Pretty Little . . . Aw, Christ, Do I Really Have To?

Is there a term for the practice of narrowing margins, blowing up font sizes, kerning type and generally adjusting leading in an attempt to pad out a term paper? I wish there were some sort of sniglet or something, because I would definitely apply it to Sara Shepard's Pretty Little Liars.

The first book in the double-digit franchise is a breezy 286-page ditty, excluding acknowledgements, that finds the time to namedrop all manner of mid-2000s era brands but somehow can't get quite its shit together enough to resolve into an actual "story," with anything resembling an actual "ending." I don't know what it is about young adult fiction that makes authors, editors and publishers think it's OK to blueball a bunch of innocent tweens with a shit-ass "to-be-continued" ending, but PLL certainly subscribes to that theory. And fuck these people for that; there's only one thing worse than a dippy tween book and that's a dippy tween cliffhanger book. It's the sort of democracy-denying move that makes kids not want to vote; the kind of fuckshow reality that makes children hate their parents, friends and country; the type of jerk move that makes a kid hate god.

There's something depressing and fatiguing about the brand namedrops that relentlessly bob around the book. It's shit like this:

• As she pulled out the Twizzlers, she felt her BlackBerry buzzing. Hanna hesitated. What if it was Sean, chewing her out via voice mail?
• She reached into her Manhattan Portage knapsack and showed Emily the top of a Jack Daniel's bottle. "[. . .] Wanna help kill it with me?"
• She leaned over and smacked Noel on the cheek with her lips. Surprisingly, Noel smelled pretty good. Like Kiehl's Blue Eagle shaving cream.
• He smelled like Lever and, strangely, chocolate, & she loved how his recently buzzed haircut showed off all the sexy angles of his face.
• She flipped her long, sleek dark-blond ponytail over her shoulder and took a swig from her purple Nalgene bottle.
• He guided her into a tiny back bedroom that had clothes all over the floor and an open bag of Lay's on the nightstand.

It goes on and on and on and on like that. And you're never sure why — other than the obvious, which is that it's lazy fucking writing to take a brand name as a stand-in for a real description. And then sometimes it just seems so opaque: Twizzlers? Lay's?

The book revolves around a bunch of bitchy, insecure or type-A middle-school girls whose friend disappears. They then move on to high school and are haunted by the missing girl, to the point where they believe the missing girl is stalking them on their cell phones. Freakouts ensue. It seems as if the missing girl is a shape shifter or the NSA. And then, motherfucker, not a goddamn thing is revealed about who or what this entity is. Because of that to-be-continued trope or whatnot. It's like, all the girls and all the boys want to IF YOU SEEK AMY.

And then there's the creep factor in pretending that these suburban Philadelphia teenage girls are somehow sexually attractive to adult males. Maybe it's just my latent adult male, but I kept thinking "You know what? Fuck you. We adult males, even fucking screwy bozo moron dipshit fuckface moron bozo males, do not give a fuck about your pathetic underage selves."

But the interesting thing is how this somehow — apparently — appeals to tweens. Do underage girls think overage males are constantly out to get into their @Abercrombie drawers? Is that some tween fantasy or something? Do they believe that there's a Santa Claus out there that delivers their runty selves to secret hidden cocktail lounges where bouncers don't exist and bartenders have terrible eyesight? Please. Get the fuck over yourselves. Besides which, we're mostly looking for sexually available 25-year-olds who "understand" us so much better than our age-appropriate partners.

Which all brings us to this: Who exactly writes this shit? This lady has a degree from NYU and a MFA from Brooklyn College. And it's not so much that this person writes moronic tween twaddle more than this person writes moronic tween twaddle with no fucking ending to speak of. And you're like, "Jesus Fucking Christ, is it so fucking hard to reveal 'The Jenna Thing' in one goddamn 'novel'? Oh, but apparently it is."

Christ almighty we've turned our backs on young people.