Point of View

The point of view of the novel switches throughout. The first section of the prologue is told in the second person. The narrator invites the reader into the world of Rosewood and asks that she imagine herself as one of the characters in the book. The narrator describes what the reader is wearing, how she feels about the boys in her class. Most importantly, the narrator asks that the reader imagine she sees a picture of a missing girl on a milk carton, and that the reader realize that the girl on the milk carton is not very different from her. This serves to give a sense of verisimilitude to the disappearance of Alison DiLaurentis, which heightens the horror of the story, which is, at its core, the story of a murder.

The prologue then switches into an omniscient point of view that has access...