Happily Ever Endings: Sweetly by Jackson Pearce

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 instalment. We hope this saves you the frustration of forgetting the ending to the last book in the series!

There WILL be SPOILERS from THIS book, and possibly ANY OTHER BOOK IN THE SERIES. Do not read on if you haven't read the book yet and do not wish to be spoiled! :)

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Synopsis from Goodreads:  Twelve years ago, Gretchen, her twin sister, and her brother went looking for a witch in the forest. They found something. Maybe it was a witch, maybe a monster, they aren’t sure—they were running too fast to tell. Either way, Gretchen’s twin sister was never seen again.


Years later, after being thrown out of their house, Gretchen and Ansel find themselves in Live Oak, South Carolina, a place on the verge of becoming a ghost town. They move in with Sophia Kelly, a young and beautiful chocolatier owner who opens not only her home, but her heart to Gretchen and Ansel.


Yet the witch isn’t gone—it’s here, lurking in the forests of Live Oak, preying on Live Oak girls every year after Sophia Kelly’s infamous chocolate festival. But Gretchen is determined to stop running from witches in the forest, and start fighting back. Alongside Samuel Reynolds, a boy as quick with a gun as he is a sarcastic remark, Gretchen digs deeper into the mystery of not only what the witch is, but how it chooses its victims. Yet the further she investigates, the more she finds herself wondering who the real monster is, and if love can be as deadly as it is beautiful.

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Happily Ever Ending: When Gretchen and Ansel have settled into Live Oak, Gretchen decides to go exploring in the forest, to see if she could find one of the witches that took her sister. She encounters one, and runs away from it, but luckily she is saved by a guy called Samuel, who shoots the witch before it can eat Gretchen. It turns out that the witches are actually called the Fenris - werewolves. Gretchen then manages to persuade Samuel to teach her to shoot them, and he gives her a few secret lessons in a field, before they can actually go out hunting.
Meanwhile, Sophia has been receiving sea shells on her porch that completely freak her out, and neither Ansel nor Gretchen know why. It turns out that for the last two years that Sophie has run the chocolate festival, girls mysteriously went missing the morning after, never to be seen again. The town thought that it was Sophia convincing them to move away, but it was actually Sophia dressing them up in red dresses and sending them into the forest to be eaten by the Fenris, and the sea shells were instructions - however many sea shells turned up near her house, was the amount of girls in red dresses that Sophia needed to supply to the wolves.
On the night of the chocolate festival, Gretchen and Samuel lie in wait in the car outside of Sophia's house. A mysterious figure comes out of the house and demands that Sophia has eleven girls to hand over. She doesn't, and this makes the wolf angry. Gretchen and Ansel get discovered when Gretchen makes a noise, and Sophia is furious that they overheard. A fight breaks out, and it is revealed that Sophia sent those girls to their deaths because the monsters have her sister Naida, and they say that they'll give back her sister if she cooperates and gives them what they want.
The book ends when there is one Fenris left, and Sophia stands in front of it and begs Gretchen to kill the beast, through her. Sophia dies, and Samuel is very seriously injured, but he pulls through. Ansel, Gretchen and Samuel leave Live Oak together to go and see the ocean.

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I hope that helped! Let me know in the comments if you think I've missed anything important out and I'll add it in :)