Publication
Date: July 7, 2015
Source: Vine
Everyone thought we were dead. We were missing for nearly
two months; we were twelve. What else could they think? –Lois
It's always been hard to talk about what happened without
sounding all melodramatic. . . . Actually, I haven't mentioned it for years,
not to a goddamned person. -Carly May
The summer precocious Lois and pretty Carly May were
twelve years old, they were kidnapped, driven across the country, and held in a
cabin in the woods for two months by a charismatic stranger. Nearly twenty
years later, Lois has become a professor, teaching British literature at a
small college in upstate New York, and Carly May is an actress in Los Angeles,
drinking too much and struggling to revive her career. When a movie with a
shockingly familiar plot draws the two women together once more, they must face
the public exposure of their secret history and confront the dark longings and
unspeakable truths that haunt them still. Maggie Mitchell's Pretty Is
beautifully defies ripped-from-the-headlines crime story expectations and
announces the debut of a masterful new storytelling talent.
Pretty Is isn’t a conventional,
edge-of-your seat thriller with a twist to amp up the suspense. If there is a
twist, it has to do with what happened in the cabin in the woods all those
years ago between the two girls, Lois and Carly May, and their abductor, the
handsome and enigmatic Zed. Although Lois and Carly May were eventually rescued
and returned to their parents the circumstances of their abduction still haunt
them even into adulthood. The narrative skillfully alternates between Lois, now
a novelist and English Lit professor, and Carly May, a B-list actress. The book
circles intriguingly around the truth, revealing some details, withholding
others as Lois and Carly May grapple with the aftermath for the first 100 or so
pages.
Then, just
when the reader’s curiosity is at its unbearable peak, Pretty Is goes
deep into the woods, with text from the book Lois wrote about that summer,
veiled as a novel. Which is fact and which is fiction? The reader is forced to
ask. What really happened? Why did Zed abduct them?
Not all of
the reader’s questions are answered by the end; however, there is a satisfying sense
of resolution and closure.
Multi-layered,
complex, and engrossing, Pretty Is is an unexpected and different kind
of “thriller.”
Maggie Mitchell has published short fiction in a number of
literary magazines, including the New Ohio Review, American Literary Review,
and Green Mountains Review. Originally from upstate New York, she now lives in
Georgia with her husband and cats. Pretty Is is her first novel.
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