Beneath the Surface

There is a dramatic juxtaposition between the surface of the novel’s world and its dark and seedy underbelly. The story takes place in an idyllic paradise where everything, on the surface, is beautiful and elegant and luxurious. Rosewood is the sort of place that most teenage girls dream of living. Everyone is rich and well-dressed and they all live in a quaint and lovely town: “Here in Rosewood, Pennsylvania, a little suburb about twenty miles from Philadelphia, you were more likely to live in a twenty-five room farmhouse with a mosaic-tiled pool and hot tub, like Spencer’s house, than in a prefab McMansion. Rosewood smelled like lilacs and mown grass in the summer and clean snow and wood stoves in the winter. It was full of lush, tall pines, acres of rustic family-run farms, and the cutest foxes and bunnies. It had...