Independent Reading Response

In the book that I am currently reading is called Flawless by Sara Shepard. This is the second book after Pretty Little Liars and so far what I have read, this book is about how four friends named, Spencer, Aria, Hanna, and Emily all meet up at the memorial for their friend, Alison, that got murdered and discover that all four of them have been receiving messages from an unknown person called A. None of them know who A is and they are all desperate to find out who it actually is because A knows all their secrets and are scared that their secrets will be reveled between them, and create rifts between their friendships. Spencer, Aria, Hanna, and Emily, all have different problems besides looking for who A is.

Additionally, each one of the friends has different problems going on from each other. One of the friends is Aria. The problem she is facing is that she is scared that A would reveal to her mother that she knew about her father having an affair with his student, Meredith, and besides telling her she kept it a secret, from the request her father made to her, and the thought that it would save her family from breaking apart. A quote from the book that shows where Aria felt she was in a dilemma is, “Aria caught her father kissing one of his student, Meredith. Byron had asked Aria not to tell her mother, and Aria never had, although she always felt guilty about it. When A threatened to tell Ella the whole ugly truth...” This quote shows the problem Aria is facing between her parents, Byron and Ella, since she feels guilty about not telling her mom about the incident, when on the other hand she has a request from her father that she doesn’t want to let down.

Furthermore, another one of the four friends that was going in a different problem was, Emily. The problem Emily was going through is that she is in a dilemma of whether or not she likes Maya and is pretending that she likes Ben, who sexually harassing her. Emily is trying to keep up her relationship with Ben, just to convince herself that she isn’t gay, but in real life she actually is and that’s why she has feelings towards her friend Maya, but is trying to avoid it, as much as she could. In the book there are two texts where it shows Emily’s problem, “He’d caught Maya and Emily in a more-than-just-friends moment at Noel’s party on Friday.” “I’m not gay, Emily said through her teeth.” These two texts show that Emily’s problem relates with doubting her own sexuality, since she likes Maya and has feelings for her, but still is trying to avoid it, just to prove that she isn’t gay in peoples’ views.

Moreover, the third friend in the group of four, which is handling another problem in her life, than the rest is Spencer. Spencer’s problem that she was handling was that her parents were mad at her for kissing her sister’s boyfriend, and because of that she was starting to get bad grades that weren’t expected from her. Spencer would always have high grades and due to the stress she was getting from that kiss, is what was leading her on neglecting towards her academics. A quote that shows her problem is “Spencer’s parents always took her side, they banned Spencer from seeing Wren ever again. She was going crazy missing him, too, but what was she supposed to do? ” This quote shows the reason to her neglecting her academics and getting stressed about it. Another text that shows Spencer’s negligence towards her academics is, “B minus. Spencer dropped the paper as if it were on fire. She scanned the quiz for answers that Squidward had graded incorrectly, but she didn’t know the answers to the questions that big red X marks next to them.” This quote shows that what her negligence towards her studies resulted. A B-minus that Spencer got isn’t expected from a student like her, since she constantly would get A’s.

Overall, the four friends all of them had problems but in different situations. The characters I focused on were Aria, Spencer, and Emily, were they had problems related to either love or family issues. In my view, the author probably included individual problems in each characters lives’ for the readers to get distracted from the problems they have with the unknown person called A. Also many of their problems included a second person, which leaded to their problem. This makes me conclude that the author is probably giving options of who A might be, since those are people who are leading to problems in their lives like A.