68 pages • 2-hour read
The Last Party
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Symbols & Motifs
Piketo the Bunny
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, death, child death, child sexual abuse, child abuse, emotional abuse, and animal death.
The story of Piketo the bunny was passed down from Leewood to Perla, and later from Perla to Sophie, becoming a motif in the text. The story illustrates secrecy and control in relationships, highlighting how those in positions of power can manipulate vulnerable people. Additionally, Perla’s decision to pass the story on to Sophie indicates that she is perpetuating an intergenerational cycle of abusive parenting.
The story follows a rabbit named Piketo, whose family knows the location of a secret carrot garden. Piketo’s family urges her to keep the garden’s existence a secret so that they can continue to enjoy the carrots uninterrupted, but Piketo chooses to reveal her family’s secret to a trusted friend. Word spreads, and Piketo and her family are brutally murdered by their fellow rabbits, who are furious about the secret. Leewood used this story to scare Perla out of reporting the sexual abuse that he was perpetrating against her friends.
As an adult, Perla recycles this same story to teach Sophie the importance of secrecy, priming her to stay quiet about Perla’s own abuse. Her direct repetition of the story symbolizes how she is passing down the abusive “lessons” she was taught as a child.
In both cases, this coerced secrecy has devastating results. Rather than reporting the abuse her friends were suffering, Perla killed them to win back Leewood’s attention. Decades later, she tries to do the same to Sophie and her friends for the same reason. The story of Piketo lingers over the narrative, highlighting the danger of control in relationships and the pervasive cycle of abuse.
Sophie’s Journal
The Last Party is punctuated by entries from Sophie’s journal. By turns perceptive, witty, and concerning, Sophie’s journal entries chronicle her developing personality and reflect the effects of Perla’s parenting on her psyche, becoming a symbol of The Lasting Effects of Childhood Trauma.
In her first journal entry, Sophie lays out her intention to cheat on her assignment. She speaks casually about her ability to lie and displays an obsession with beauty, fame, and status inherited from Perla. This entry also establishes Sophie’s ability to detect lies, as she claims, “When I watch Court TV, I immediately spot the liars” (5).
As Perla plans the second Folcrum Party, she believes that Sophie is fully under her control. Sophie’s journal entries reveal a different reality. Sophie is a keen observer: She recognizes many of Perla’s deceptions but keeps this knowledge to herself, knowing that it gives her some power over her parents. Sophie learns from, and mimics, her mother’s duplicitous behavior. She is unconcerned with the consequences of her behavior, casually musing that if she ever commits a crime, “[she’ll] make sure [she] lie[s] [her] way out of it” (71). While some of Sophie’s statements can be read as a child testing out boundaries, her extremely cavalier attitude toward lying suggests that Perla’s neglectful parenting is warping her sense of morality.
Though Sophie picks up on Perla’s lies, she never suspects Perla of trying to harm her, evincing both her implicit trust in her mother and the emotional manipulation she has been subjected to. Despite her perceptive nature, she remains unaware of the threat that Perla poses, underscoring just how deeply trust can be manipulated by an abusive parent.
Perla’s Scar
Early in the narrative, Perla mentions a scar on an undisclosed part of her body. The scar, hidden beneath her polished interior, symbolizes the past that she has tried to bury. As the narrative develops and more of Perla’s history is revealed, the scar comes to symbolize the lasting trauma of her childhood—both the harm done to her and the harm she’s done to others.
Perla makes several vague references to the scar’s meaningful nature, calling it “proof [she] could withstand anything” (79). She refuses to have it surgically corrected, a decision that clashes with her desire for physical perfection.
As Torre fills in more details of her story, readers learn the significance of Perla’s scar. It is on her neck and is the result of surviving a murder attempt by her father at the age of 12. When Leewood discovered that Perla (then Jenny) murdered Kitty and Lucy, he attempted to kill her by cutting her throat, an act that scarred her both mentally and physically. Due to Leewood’s “hesitancy during the act” (79), Perla survived. To Perla, the shallowness of the cut is proof of her father’s love. As an adult, Perla weaponizes the scar as a manipulation tactic to garner sympathy and love from Grant.
After foiling her plan to murder Sophie, Grant kills Perla by cutting her throat. He drags the knife over her old scar tissue, symbolically finishing the job that Leewood started and ridding the world of a dangerous person. When Perla’s body is autopsied, the old scar tissue underneath the fresh cut reveals the truth of her identity to law enforcement. Despite her carefully curated image, Perla is unable to outrun the literal and figurative scars of her traumatic past.
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