Summary: Due to all of the fighting the four devised a plan to make everyone stop fighting the plan ended up killing the three while Cadence survived and she had been talking to their spirits all of summer seventeen. The others died summer fifteen at age fifteen. Cadence felt so guilty she blocked out all of the memories. The liars tell her it was not her fault but that she needed to know and that they no longer will be able to appear to her. Cadence is sad and after a few days decides she needs to rebuild her life and live for all of the Liars. Themes: 1.) Power - The liars have spent their entire lives under someone else's constant control. They decide to try and take their power back using the fire they start but it only backfires. In taking down Clairmont they were hoping to defeat the patriarchy. As is found out in the novel thirst for power eventually leads to ruin.
Favorite Quote: “Johnny. Johnny wanted to run a marathon. He wanted to go mile upon mile, proving his lungs would not give out. [...] He refused to be serious, he was infuriatingly unserious, but he was as committed to the things that mattered to him as anyone could possibly be. The running. Will and Carrie. The Liars. His sense of what was right. He gave up his college fund without a second thought, to stand up for his principles. I think of Johnny’s strong arms, the stripe of white sunblock on his nose, the time we were sick together from poison ivy and lay next to each other in the hammock, scratching. The time he built me and Mirren a dollhouse of cardboard and stones he’d found on the beach. Jonathan Sinclair Dennis, you would have been a light in the dark for so many people. You have been one. You have. And I have let you down the worst possible way. I cry for Mirren, who wanted to see the Congo. She didn’t know how she wanted to live or what she believed yet; she was searching and knew she was drawn to that place. It will never be real to her now, never anything more than photographs and films and stories published for people’s entertainment. [...] Mirren will never have a wedding with yellow roses or a groom who loves her enough to wear a stupid yellow cummerbund. She was irritable. And bossy. But always funny about it. It was easy to make her mad, and she was nearly always cross with Bess and annoyed with the twins—but then she’d fill with regret, moaning in agony over her own sharp tongue. She did love her family, [...] Mirren, I can’t even say sorry. There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel. And Gat, my Gat. He will never go to college. He had that hungry mind, constantly turning things over, looking not for answers but for understanding. He will never satisfy his curiosity, never finish the hundred best novels ever written, never be the great man he might have been. He wanted to stop evil. He wanted to express his anger. He lived big, my brave Gat. [...] I loved him. I love him. As best I could. ”
This is my favorite quote I tried to shorten it as much as possible but I enjoyed it because Cadence is trying to sum up the lives of those she loves most. This is something we have all witnessed at funerals. How do we put into words the people we love most in this world but we do eventually figure it out. I thought Cadence did it beautifully.