Ruthless (Pretty Little Liars #10)

As the timeline of events starts to make less and less sense this volume’s prologue is set in the middle of the story, somewhere between the JI and the events of the last book so far as I can make out. Its contents are a reminder of Aria and Hanna’s trip to Iceland, during which we have already been told there will be an incident (hereafter the II) which will eventually be revealed to us at one of the various artificial dénouements of the series. Emily is pregnant with the baby

As the timeline of events starts to make less and less sense this volume’s prologue is set in the middle of the story, somewhere between the JI and the events of the last book so far as I can make out. Its contents are a reminder of Aria and Hanna’s trip to Iceland, during which we have already been told there will be an incident (hereafter the II) which will eventually be revealed to us at one of the various artificial dénouements of the series. Emily is pregnant with the baby we already knew she had and Spencer has some problem related to buying study-aid drugs, falls for the standard ‘your friend is in the other room telling us everything’ TV-cop interrogation trick and sets her friend up as a drug dealer in order to take the heat off herself. Just to remind you, she is one of the series’ heroines.

And so to the present. Emily is busy moping about wearing the pants she stole from AliCourt 4½ years ago like the crazy obsessive she is, staring at the poster of Michael Phelps which has reappeared again regardless of continuity and returned to her wall. The sulk is broken temporarily when her sister Beth turns up, but since she is completely indistinguishable from her sister Carolyn I doubt it will make too much difference. Spencer is now living with her violent patriarchal stepfather-to-be and his daughter Amelia, who quite reasonably hates Spencer for getting her brother sent to military school and bullying her mercilessly. Spencer in turn cannot get on with Amelia because she is a girl, and worse yet not even stylish. Also, she might not have got into Princeton after all because of some stupid candidate mix-up, so we’ll have to hear her obsessing over that yet again. Other events include Aria being dumped by her awful for boyfriend for being pathetic and unpleasant, which is hard to care greatly about, and Hanna confessing to her father all the terrible secrets she was keeping from him, which formed a major part of the previous book. It turns out that he completely forgives her, since stealing $10,000 and framing an innocent man are matters of little consequence, and a fair portion of the last book is now even more pointless than previously.

It turns out that Emily’s new sister Beth is a scandalous “risk-taker”, as evidence by her listening to L’il Kim and having a boyfriend. She and Emily attend a monster-themed fancy-dress party as the Statue of Liberty and a flapper, for some reason, and Emily immediately meets a new love-interest called Kay, who is dressed as a mermaid. We also learn that Shepard considers Supergirl, Mexicans and Native Americans to be monsters. Spencer meanwhile is busy with the school play we have been hearing about for some time, in which she is risibly cast as Lady Macbeth alongside new student and motorcycle bad-boy Beau. The skinny-jean-clad Weird Sisters are played by the girls’ enemy clique, since casting has to mirror the school’s internal politics exactly. Also they only have roughly 8 students in the entire year-group (10 if you count Alison incarnations), so the choice is limited. Aria pauses in hypocritically bemoaning how “the bimbos of the world always got the guys” to get back in touch with her teacher-ex Ezra on a casual whim, hoping to make her more recent ex jealous. And Hanna gets involved in a cynical ploy to manipulate a bunch of apolitical teens into appearing to be rallying in support of her father’s senate bid, but is swiftly distracted by a boy called Liam, with whom she finds herself up against an alleyway wall quite literally 5 minutes after they meet.

On the strength of a single text casually asking how he is, Exra turns up on Aria’s lawn with a hand-painted sign reading “I MISSED YOU, ARIA!” and a luxury picnic, thus reminding us he is a weird stalker-pervert type. He also excuses his total disappearance from the narrative since Book 4 by explaining that his e-mails were hacked a year ago, and thus he has been unable to contact anyone. This in no way distracts from Shepard’s abysmal attempt to disguise her straw-grabbing desperation for plots but Aria is happy enough, and is rolling around half-naked in a field with him a couple of hours later. Emily’s romance with yet another girl blossoms as usual, raising the question of why in Book 1 she was so concerned about being gay since every female she meets seems to be at least bisexual, as well as conveniently attracted to her. We don’t hear about her going any further than the casual kissing stage though, because Shepard is a little bit afraid of lesbians. Spencer is a the only one without an instant partner as she is distracted by the return of Kelsey, the girl she framed for drug-dealing, who coincidentally turns out to be in Amelia’s “Charity Chamber Music Group”, whatever that might be. We also hear a little more about the drug in question, an imaginary and stupid magical study-drug called “Easy-A” which is pushed on both girls by a random boy at a bar and which they take for 6 weeks before being caught by the police, which is easily the least realistic and most dull drug storyline I have ever read. It’s quite the big deal for the characters though, as no one in Rosewood has ever taken any drugs before despite the fact they’re all super-rich dimwits with no sense of consequences. Somewhere along the way we are instructed that this round’s suspects for A include Kelsey, a particularly obvious red herring, and Kate(again).

Eventually it turns out that Kay and Kelsey are the same person, and all four girls decide that she therefore is probably ‘A’, logic not being their strong suit, although to be fair it would fit with Emily’s propensity to be attracted to psychopaths. Nobody does much about this though. Instead Hanna nearly goes on holiday with the sex-focused strange boy she has only met once before realising in a tedious plot twist that he is the son of her father’s rival for senate, in a tired and inconsequential Romeo and Juliet steal. Sticking with the Shakespeare, Spencer attends an astoundingly cliché-ridden coaching session to prepare her for her part in Macbeth, where she realises several hundred pages after the rest of us that she is going to get involved with her co-star Beau. It takes a little while, but eventually after berating her for 20 minutes he tells her that he thinks her acting is “good” and she melts and throws herself into his arms. And Emily continues chastely dating Kelsey, because she never takes any action or does anything.

Aria’s love-life takes a yet more stupid turn when it turns out that Ezra has written a novel about her and their illegal fling of last year. Here the phrase “written a novel” means “copied down every dull chat he and Aria have ever had, and bulked it out with diatribes asserting his own personal philosophical opinions”. It sounds truly awful. Rather than finding it intensely creepy or demanding some of the potential royalties since a massive amount of the text is simply culled from her conversation, Aria is delighted – attention from others can only be positive, especially if it includes prurient physical flattery. Hanna’s star-crossed lovers act drags on, as Liam becomes increasingly desperate to drag her to a series of far-flung locations on the spur of the moment. Spencer’s love for Beau has now endowed her with magical subconscious thespian abilities. Aria finishes Ezra’s book, which ends with the pseudo-Ezra lead character being suddenly killed by anthrax spores mailed to him by an “unknown international terrorist”. I hope this is some sort of satire I’m not quite getting. Aria also raises some minor questions about the book but this immediately offends Ezra’s pride and he commences to sulk, paying Aria back for her temerity in failing to unquestioningly adore him by flirting with her arch nemesis and giving away the secret-filled manuscript about her love-life.

The usual mid-book lull occurs, as Shepard tries to fill pages ahead of this episode’s conclusion. Shepard continues to misunderstand the concept of irony. Everyone persists in wearing “booties”, which is confusing as to me that means knitted baby shoes, we are treated to constant reminders of Isabel’s orange skin, Kate’s “Jo Malone Fig and Cassis body lotion”, Alison’s vanilla soap, the product-based smell of every boy in the series, etc. The media reports the Tabitha case incessantly, as presumably there is no other news in America. Hanna shifts focus from fake suspect one (Kelsey) to fake suspect 2 (Kate) for no particular reason. Spencer reminds us that Kelsey is her preferred bet. Emily does absolutely nothing. Mike the Pervert takes one of his girlfriends to an underwear runway show, which sounds romantic, although for some reason he expects to see many pairs of “Double Dees” even though most models don’t have enough flesh on their whole body to fill an AA-cup. The girls get together and decide once again that actually they prefer Kelsey as a suspect, with Emily as the inevitable lone voice of dissent. Emily is pushed down a hill by someone who she thinks was Alison, although given that she is clinically obsessed with Alison that’s not particularly surprising. Spencer rehearses for Macbeth by chanting “Out, damned spot!” over-and-over-again until she has some kind of fit, conjuring up pills stuck to her hands and dead girls haunting her, and throws herself into an icy brook. Directly afterward Hanna has one of her dream-visions of Alighost, this time in Kelsey’s room at university for some reason, before letting Liam climb up to her bedroom via her new plot-enforced Juliet balcony. Aria upsets Ezra by implying that his unpublished ramblings might possibly not necessarily be a “literary masterpiece”.

Eventually The Scottish Play is ready for its single performance. Spencer totally loses her inability to act due to stress, leading the director to actually threaten to change her for another actress between mid-play, despite that being shockingly stupid. Then she suddenly remembers how to act again, is amazing, and is rewarded with yet another kiss from Beau. The 2/3 party this time is a post-performance cast gathering, which most of the girls attend even though they were nothing to do with the play. At the do Emily tells Kelsey about Spencer framing her. Aria is uncomfortable being stalked by an ex-teacher at a school event, so Ezra descends into yet another sulk and gets off with evil pneumatic sex-puppet Klaudia behind some bins in an alleyway. Spencer mistakenly thinks Kelsey is trying to kill her and reasonably tries to strangle her to death with her bare hands. She escapes without legal ramifications, despite the numerous witnesses, because everyone agrees it’s obviously caused by the play having temporarily “taken over her mind”.

We then return to the victim-trapped-in-car-with-potential-killer storyline again, but this time with Emily and Kelsey in the respective roles. The other girls race after them with their usual disregard for road-safety and innocent bystanders, and everyone ends up once again at Floating Man Quarry, death-site of A#1 all the way back in Book 4. Kelsey drones on-and-on about secrets and bad deeds without naming any specifics before deciding to jump from the quarry and kill herself. She is then saved by Spencer, but commences to OD on her stupid fictional speed pills in a manner both oddly-timed and untenable. The usual convenient ambulance arrives and she is borne away, leaving the four girls behind to discuss with relief how no-one will ever believe her supposed murder-accusations, since she is now a known drug user and everything she says will be written off as substance-induced -hallucinations. So it’s a happy ending except for that photograph of Tabitha’s dead body that Spencer received. We then veer off into some junk about Liam turning out to be a cheat and Hanna wreaking her vengeance by telling her father all the juicy gossip about Liam’s father that he revealed to her for some unknown reason, thereby turning a supposedly democratic election process into the offshoot of a teenage love-spat. This has no place this near to the end of the book and serves only to reduce what little tension or narrative thrust there was. Another plot lurch leads to a passing mention to a new forensic procedure which will prove that the body on the beach was in fact Tabitha, even though that has never previously been in doubt. The II is also brought up again, in readiness for the next book. Aria realises that she prefers mindless lump Noel to pretentious pseudo-intellectual Ezra, even though they’re both unreliable cheats, and gets back together with him. Spencer finds out that the whole stupid Princeton thing was just another trick from ‘A’#3, and she has wasted our time going on about it.

Finally all four girls go to visit Kelsey in the Preserve, the nearby mental institute which operates a drop-in policy for random teenagers but also imprisoned Alison for 3½ years in total secrecy. Kelsey is now a classic TV-movie lunatic, all matted hair and circles under the eyes. She now admits that she had drugs in her room anyway the night when Spencer planted some there, and so apparently totally deserved to go to jail and have her life ruined. Although Spencer seems to have escaped that judgement. In other news she quite blatantly wasn’t ‘A’#3 in any way, and the girls are all idiots. It then turns out that Tabitha was also at the Preserve, which is pretty crowded with identikit teenage girls, and was exactly the same age as Alison. This is significant for some reason. The Shepard had a quick boast in the acknowledgements about how “compelling and interesting” her own book series is. The end.

Most Racially Insensitive “Rich White Kid” Attitude
Hanna on Iceland:

“Was a country full of weird, pale Vikings who were all related to one another worthy of her Elizabeth and James high-heeled booties?”

“Spencer couldn’t believe that she and her friends were yet again faced with the task of figuring out who A might be.”

“The mermaid’s eyes brightened. She reminded Emily of a sexier, green-haired version of Ariel from The Little Mermaid.”

“ “I recently broke up with someone, too,” Hanna said quietly, thinking of Mike, although now when she tried to imagine his face, all she could see was a big crayon scribble.”

“The church had once been a mansion that housed an older, wealthy railroad baron and his Olympic-team-in-training of male fencers. The railroad baron had gone crazy, murdered several of the fencers, and escaped to South America”

“Liam sighed. “I pine for the time when my parents got along.” ”

“the sexiest fitted corduroys Spencer had ever seen on a guy.”