Happily Ever Endings... Hunting Lila by Sarah Alderson

Happily Ever Endings... was born out of sheer frustration. You know how when you read a series and you love it but the last book takes a little while to come out and then you sort of forget parts of the novel? That's what these posts are going to serve to remedy. Happily Ever Ending... is a short post about what happened at the ending of each book that is going to be in a series for people who need a quick reminder of what happened in the previous installment. It's really annoying when you can't remember what happens and don't have time for a reread, so this hopefully will be a huge help!

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Synopsis from Goodreads: 17-year-old Lila has two secrets she’s prepared to take to the grave. The first is that she can move things just by looking at them. The second is that she’s been in love with her brother’s best friend, Alex, since forever.

After a mugging exposes her unique ability, Lila decides to run to the only people she can trust—her brother and Alex. They live in Southern California where they work for a secret organisation called The Unit, and Lila discovers that the two of them are hunting down the men who murdered her mother five years before. And that they’ve found them.

In a world where nothing and no one is quite as they seem, Lila quickly realises that she is not alone—there are others out there just like her—people with special powers—and her mother’s killer is one of them…

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Happily Ever Ending: Lila flies out to California to stay with her brother after she nearly kills some muggers with her telekinetic ability. She finds out that he and his best friend, Alex, have been working to find her mother’s killers, with a group called The Unit.

It’s Alex’s birthday party, and she finds out from a man called Key, who has a special ability just like she does, that they are actually hunting people with powers and ‘containing’ them. He asks her for his help to find his son and she agrees.

After seeing Alex supposedly flirting with his boss, Rachel, Lila decides to go home on her own, as she can’t bare to see the boy she loves flirting with another woman, especially since she just found out that he captures and possibly kills people like her. However, another man with a power called Demos is hunting her so he can trade her to the Unit to get his wife back. However, Key goes to her house to warn her Demos is coming, and Alex shows up and manages to get her away. They take Key and make a deal that if he keeps them updated on Demos (as Key’s power is to leave his body and therefore he can spy on them), they’ll not contain him and his son. At this point in the book, they all believe that Demos is the enemy and the Unit is trying to capture him and imprison him. However, when Alex finds out what Lila can do, he is forced to consider whether everything the Unit has told him is true - he’s believed for a while that the people with powers are ALL bad, but obviously Lila isn’t.

Then they arrange to meet up with Jack, Lila’s brother, and tell him about her ability. However, when they meet, they’re interrupted by Demos and all his friends. They kidnap Lila and they say they’ll only give her back once Alex and Jack have brought Alicia (Demos’ wife) back from imprisonment at the Unit base. They go to get her, but have to bring Rachel back in order to be able to get Alicia out safely without being caught.
It turns out that Demos didn’t kill Lila’s mother - it was the Unit because she could read minds. When Alex and Jack get back from rescuing Alicia, Lila tries to convince them that Demos didn’t kill her mother, and he was actually in love with her before she met Lila and Jack’s dad. It isn’t until Suki, Demos’ mind reading friend, reads Rachel’s mind and finds out that Lila’s mother is still alive but being held captive by the Unit, that Alex and Jack believe that the Unit is actually the enemy.

Unfortunately, during this whole discovery, the Unit arrived with an army and the book ends with a big fight between the Unit, and Lila, Alex,Jack, and Demos and his friends with powers. Jack is shot, potentially fatally, but his body couldn’t be recovered without Lila and Alex also getting killed so we never find out if Jack actually survived.

After the fight, Lila and Alex need to disappear and escape from the Unit to be able to even have a chance to save her brother and mother, so they escape south to Mexico City while Demos, Suki and their friends head north to distract the Unit.

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I hope this helped! Now you're all set up to read the next one! If I've missed anything important or you think there's something wrong, let me know in the comments!