68 pages • 2-hour read
The Last Party
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Themes
The Deceptive Nature of Appearances
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, death, child death, child abuse, emotional abuse, and addiction.
In the Wultzes’ upper-class gated community, appearances are essential, with residents carefully curating their public image to remain in the inner circle. Perla exploits her community’s obsession with looks and status to hide her true character, using her picture-perfect exterior to allay suspicion while she plans a cold-blooded triple murder. By contrasting Perla’s appearance with her unscrupulous character, The Last Party presents a cautionary tale about the deceptive nature of appearances.
After her induction into upper-class society at 12, Perla learned how to fit seamlessly into Brighton Estates. One key aspect of fitting in is adhering to the community’s stringent beauty standards. The other women are hyper-critical of one another’s appearances, with one Brighton Estates resident noting in Chapter 18 that Perla’s nose has a “speed bump in the middle of it” (72). Physical beauty is associated with a virtuous character, and Perla plays on this perception, curating her appearance with expensive clothes and plastic surgery to present the perfect façade.
Perla’s image curation extends to her family. The Wultz home “always [looks like] a magazine shoot” (10), belying the emotional abuse that Perla uses to control her family life. Sophie is praised as “well mannered” (41), despite her diary entries revealing that she has picked up Perla’s penchant for lying and manipulation. Perla uses public acts of kindness or heroism to paint herself as sympathetic. She is keenly aware of her ability to manipulate appearances and looks forward to playing the part of a grieving mother after killing Sophie.
This theme extends beyond the characters and into the novel’s structure. Torre mirrors Perla’s duplicity in the narrative, manipulating appearances to play on readers’ expectations. For much of the novel, she obfuscates the truth in selective ways to suggest that Jenny Folcrum was an innocent victim who was murdered at the Folcrum Party. She shares select pieces of information, such as the fact that Jenny’s throat was slit, while never stating outright that Jenny is dead. As Dr. Maddox states in Chapter 55, “[W]e all have biases on our perspectives” (204). The novel’s climactic twist plays on the fact that most people are unlikely to suspect a 12-year-old girl of double murder.
Throughout the novel, quotations from secondary characters provide an outsider’s view of Perla and the Wultz family. Some characters unquestioningly view Perla as a part of their in-group. They are unable to imagine violence or dysfunction taking place in the home of such a “perfect” family as the Wultzes. Others pick up on something being “off” below the surface, but none are willing to speak up against the Wultzes due to their status.
After Perla’s crime is revealed, Grant is briefly jailed on suspicion of her murder. In an ironic moment, Sophie takes a page from Perla’s book and publicly lies about her mother, stating that Perla tried to drown her. Though the incident is fabricated, Sophie’s lie reveals Perla’s true character beneath the deception. In Perla, Torre provides the ultimate example that appearances can be deceiving, encouraging readers to look past the surface when making character judgments.
The Lasting Effects of Childhood Trauma
The Last Party explores how childhood trauma can shape identity and morality, using the characters of Leewood, Perla, and Sophie to illustrate that patterns of neglect and abuse can ripple out across generations. Through the novel’s dysfunctional parent-child relationships, Torre illustrates the destructive power and lifelong effects of abusive parenting.
In Chapter 31, Perla remarks, “If anyone knew the power of an adult’s dominance over a child, it was me” (125). Perla was raised by neglectful and abusive parents, and her upbringing has deeply shaped her character. Perla was raised by Leewood, a pedophile and neglectful father with an alcohol and substance dependency. After her mother’s death, Perla essentially replaced her, taking care of both Leewood and herself—she recalls cooking for him and doing his laundry. Perla proudly says that “each of those small things fortified the woman [she] eventually became” (125). Though she is proud of her self-reliance, it is clear that the trauma of having to care for herself contributed to her need for total control in adulthood.
As an adult, Perla continues the cycle of abuse in her own household. She displays a “broken moral compass” (336). She struggles to feel emotions like sadness and sympathy and is primarily motivated by “envy, greed [and] passion” (137). Though Perla’s twisted morality initially appears to be innate, The Last Party posits that her upbringing played a key role in the development of her identity. As an adult, she is still motivated by her need to feel loved and validated by Leewood, a desire that leads her to plan the second Folcrum Party.
Perla perpetuates the cycle of parental abuse with Sophie. She never wanted a child and has resented Sophie from birth. Her trauma from seeing Leewood abuse her friends manifests in an intense jealousy and resentment of Sophie’s adolescent body. Though she does not cross the line into physical harm before the attempted murders, Perla is a neglectful mother who does little to encourage Sophie’s personal development.
Sophie’s journal entries reflect how Perla’s parenting is shaping her. After observing her mother’s frequent deceptions, Sophie is cavalier about lying, stating, “If I do anything worth being locked up over, I’ll make sure I lie my way out of it” (71). She is shallow in her judgments of others and has no qualms about manipulation. Sophie chooses her friends based on who is most willing to her bidding, stating, “I think of people like Bridget like my cheerleaders” (76). Torre hints that Perla has thus set Sophie on track to becoming just like her.
One key difference between Perla and Sophie, however, is that Sophie has a loving, stable, and morally upright father in Grant. Unlike Perla, Grant is thrilled to be a parent and dotes on Sophie. The novel thus ends on a hopeful note: It seems likely that Sophie will recover from her trauma and become a functional, moral adult. In contrasting Perla’s destructive and tragic life with Sophie’s uncertain but hopeful future, Torre reminds readers that while traumatic experiences can shape people, they don’t have to define them.
The Danger of Control in Relationships
One of Perla’s defining traits is her obsessive need for control, which stems from the loss of agency she experienced during childhood. In adulthood, this manifests as emotional manipulation, secrecy, and psychological domination, particularly within her familial relationships. Through Perla’s dynamics with both Grant and her father, Torre explores how power imbalances can warp relationships into vehicles for abuse.
The primary example of this theme is Perla and Grant’s relationship. Perla is an abusive spouse who controls Grant primarily through emotional manipulation. After studying him for years, she can predict his reactions to almost everything. She unabashedly weaponizes this knowledge, stating, “The ultimate power in marriage is the manipulation ability of knowing how and when your spouse will act and react” (11). Perla is intimately familiar with Grant’s traumatic past and his fear of losing the ones he loves. She plays on this fear to compel him into putting her wants and needs over anything else. Perla also uses sex to distract Grant from conflicts and gaslights him out of confronting her about her increasingly disturbing behaviors. By manipulating Grant’s every action, Perla robs him of his agency, ensuring that he does not catch onto her murderous plans until it’s almost too late.
Another key control tactic that Perla utilizes is secrecy. The intricate plan she constructs in the leadup to the second Folcrum Party relies on the assumption that the involved parties won’t communicate with one another and realize the extent of her lies. Perla encourages secrecy within the Wultz house, using tactics that range from phony kindness to veiled threats. She is particularly stringent about teaching Sophie the importance of secrets, telling her, “When we are told to keep secrets […] you must take that responsibility seriously. Especially the secrets of your family” (29). By enforcing secrecy in her household, she ensures that Grant and Sophie can’t unite against her. She effectively isolates them from one another, enabling herself to sow animosity and plant false leads without interference.
Perla’s use of secrecy as a control tactic calls back to the theme of the effects of childhood trauma. Perla learned how to enforce secrecy through threats from her father. Though Perla is the powerful figure in her relationships with Grant and Sophie, Torre subverts this dynamic through her relationship with Leewood. Their relationship provides another example of the dangers of control, as Leewood weaponized Perla’s trust and reliance on him to manipulate her actions. He used his unilateral power over Perla to enable his continued abuse of her friends. Rather than recognizing Leewood’s behavior as abusive, a young Perla internalized it, and she then emulates it in adulthood.
Perla’s tight control over her family enables her to keep her plans secret until days before Sophie’s party. She is only foiled when Grant discovers her identity. The conversation with Leewood in prison marks a pivotal shift for Grant’s character. The illusions and “booby traps” that Perla has used to control him fall apart, and he stops operating out of a fear of losing her. By confronting and killing Perla, Grant reclaims control over his life and saves Sophie, breaking the cycle of violence and trauma that Perla was perpetuating. Through the arcs of The Last Party’s central characters, Torre illustrates that control and dominance in relationships can have devastating, and even fatal, consequences.
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