Pretty Little Liars #12: Burned Blog Post
I recently started reading Pretty
Little Liars #12: Burned. It’s quite different than the other Pretty Little
Liars books, but it’s a nice plot twist. I think that this is a unique craft
the author used to get readers thinking. Being stuck in Rosewood wouldn’t help
the story advance any further, so they kept the same story and characters, just
shifted the setting. This keeps the reader on their feet, aware of characters
and possible conflicts, but they have to keep the new setting in mind, making
it difficult for the readers to predict future events.
Every main character is on the trip,
and most of their friends are also on the trip. This makes the story “work”
because you don’t out of the blue, lose a vital character, only “extras” are
missing. For example, Riley Wolfe isn’t there, and she’s not a main character,
but I can tell that since they keep referencing her, she’ll be important, as
well as the reason as to why she’s not on the cruise. So having the characters
there helps the reader feel as in the moment as they did in the other eleven
books, and missing characters helps spark new conflicts and mysteries.
Introducing a new setting makes new
plot twists less predictable. I love this series but sometimes you could knew
exactly when one character would get into a fight with another, or get killed.
Now that the setting is on the cruise, we don’t know everything that could
happen. We haven’t explored the ship as we have Rosewood, and since the ship is
docking in three different islands over the course of the trip, there’s even
more to discover. The girls are in the middle of the ocean, and A can still
contact them. This means that the girls are less protected- they have nowhere
to hide if they are among A- and have more of a chance of finding out who A is.
This is going to help the story advance much more than it would in Rosewood.
I think this is really helpful for
authors writing series of books, or short stories. It really doesn’t help me in
my writing, since I don’t continue on with my stories and make them into a
series. But, if at any point in the future I do decide to write a series, I’ll
definitely use this tool of setting change in one of the later books.
