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Summary
Summary
"[A] stunning, multilayered debut . . . . with a great deal of intelligent, beautifully written panache. . . . What a satisfying novel, with its shifting perspectives and competing stories and notion that our relationship to the truth changes with time and distance." - The New York Times
A fiercely imagined fiction debut in which two young women face what happened the summer they were twelve, when a handsome stranger abducted them
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.
Author Notes
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.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Mitchell's debut novel is both a skewering of America's JonBenet Ramsey-style fixation with little girls in peril and a fascinating glimpse at the intensity of female friendship. In the mid 1990s Carly May Smith and Lois Lonsdale, both 12, were kidnapped and held in a remote enclave of the Adirondacks for two long, claustrophobic months. Precocious Carly was a preteen pageant circuit darling, desperate to escape the dreariness of Nebraska farm life. Quiet and intelligent Lois grew up in her parents' Connecticut B&B and devoted herself to spelling bees. All they had in common were public profiles: their abductor had used newspaper clippings about them to devise his kidnapping. Told in flashbacks from alternating points of view, the work is most interesting when Mitchell explores the girls' desires and neuroses. Under coincidental circumstances (Lois writes a novel about the experience, and Carly acts in the film adaptation), the women are reunited as adults and must revisit the truth about what really happened in that cabin in the woods. Psychologically rich, with haunting detail, Mitchell's work is a disturbing, insightful look at our deep fears. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
When they were 12, Carly May, a tween beauty queen, and Lois, a spelling bee champ, were kidnapped by a handsome, mysterious man with obscure but apparently chaste intentions and held hostage in a secluded forest lodge. After six weeks, they were rescued by the police and, physically unharmed, were expected to tuck the incident away and go on with their lives. Now they are nearly 30 - Carly May a D-list actress, Lois an academically promising English professor - and, though long out of touch, both are still struggling to come to terms with that buried, bewildering event. What does it mean, the book asks, to have a traumatic experience whose limits aren't clear-cut, and might blur to include feelings of attachment, excitement, even pleasure? This is an intriguing premise, and parts of "Pretty Is" nicely portray the conflicted emotions that have haunted and continue to haunt the two women. (Mitchell is especially good at this when switching to the third person in what purports to be an excerpt from Lois's autobiographical novel, adapted into a movie in which Carly May ends up being cast.) In other ways, though, the book does both too much and not enough. Its self-conscious invoking and merging of genres - from potboiler thriller to psychological novel to 18th-century abduction narrative - is clever but not completely successful, in the end leaving the characters less than fully developed and the plot overburdened with twists.
School Library Journal Review
When they were 12 years old, Lois and Carly May were abducted from the streets of their respective towns and taken to a cabin in the Adirondacks, where they were held captive for six weeks by a man they knew only as Zed. Now in their early 30s, they have not had any contact since that summer. Lois is an English professor who has written a pseudonymous thriller based on the abduction, and Carly May has become a B-list actress named Chloe Savage, who has just received the script of a new movie based on Lois's novel. Meanwhile, one of Lois's students somehow knows about her past and is showing an unhealthy interest in her. Chloe and Lois agree to meet on the British Columbia set of the movie, where past and present collide in unexpected ways. Alternating between Chloe and Lois's narrations, and between the present-day and their respective memories of that summer, Mitchell's debut novel explores rich the psychological territory of how the protagonists perceived the events of that summer, how it affected their relationships with their families and with each other, and how it marked the course of their lives. VERDICT This is an engaging thriller that will intrigue teens who were fascinated by Jaycee Dugard, Elizabeth Smart, and other tales of abduction.-Sarah Flowers, formerly of Santa Clara County (CA) Library © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Black River by Tom Harper; Vanishing Games by Roger Hobbs; The Quality of Silence by Rosamund Lupton; The Mistake I Made by Paula Daly; Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell It is a truism that, if the writing is convincing, thrillers can tell the most ludicrous stories and yet feel utterly plausible. The prolific Tom Harper's latest novel, Black River (Hodder, [pound]19.99), is a shameless Boy's Own romp in the Rider Haggard mode. Middle-aged Kel is on holiday with his family when he meets Anton, charismatic leader of an imminent expedition to the lost Inca city of Paititi. Something of a Watsonian bumbler, Kel makes little impression until he reveals himself to be a doctor -- well, an anaesthetist -- at which point Anton invites him to join his crew... Black River knows better than to take itself too seriously. It has fun with Kel's bourgeois uptightness, which he is quicker to project on to his wife than recognise in himself; yet it is crafted with a care and intelligence that mask its underlying absurdity. The same can be said of Vanishing Games (Doubleday, [pound]12.99), Roger Hobbs's follow-up to his accomplished debut Ghostman, which features the same main character, Jack. The opening chapter, in which a sapphire heist at sea goes horribly wrong, is one of the most deftly choreographed bits of suspense writing I've read. Jack is the "ghostman", the gang-member expert in the "business of disappearing". Vanishing Games fleshes out his relationship with "jugmarker" -- or chief tactician -- Angela, whom he hasn't seen for six years, since she vanished in the aftermath of a previous botched job. Scared for her life, she has called on Jack to extricate her from this new mess -- for the sapphire heist was her project. While there is honour among thieves, the pair are loners, sociopathic chameleons, and the undeclared attraction between them powers the novel as we follow them into the depths of Macau's criminal underworld. Tighter even than Ghostman, Vanishing Games has the confidence and brio of Terry Hayes's I Am Pilgrim. If you enjoyed that, you'll love this. Sometimes you want to believe but can't. Rosamund Lupton pretty much invented a genre with the deservedly bestselling Sister and its follow-up Afterwards, and her desire to try something different is understandable. But The Quality of Silence (Little, Brown, [pound]14.99) is disappointing: thin and frictionless, its anti-fracking message delivered with the limpid simplicity of the Young Adult novel it would surely be revealed as, were scientists ever to test its literary DNA. It follows Yasmin and her deaf 11-year-old daughter Ruby as they travel across Alaska in search of Yasmin's cameraman husband who has, the authorities insist, been killed in a fire. The narrative shifts between omniscient third person and the unfeasibly precocious Ruby, with whom Yasmin exchanges nary a cross word as they make one of the most dangerous journeys on earth, during an ice storm, in a vehicle Yasmin has never been trained to drive. I never felt they were genuinely in jeopardy, despite the scary man who pursues them in the manner of the Spielberg film Duel. Paula Daly's The Mistake I Made (Bantam, [pound]16.99) is a Cumbria-set riff on the Robert Redford film Indecent Proposal. Businessman Scott offers to pay divorced physiotherapist and single mother Roz for sex. Deeply in debt, she accepts. Roz is a chatty, digressive narrator, and an extensive ambient preamble fleshes out her life and relationships before anything thrilling takes place. But then Roz's sleazy boss gets wind of what's going on and propositions her himself, at which point Scott shows his true colours (as if we were in any doubt) and Daly crunches from fifth to first gear. Still, it's thoroughly enjoyable -- a big-hearted, empathetic novel about ordinary lives and the tremors that can rock them. It's also very funny. I liked the running gag where almost everyone Roz meets, including the police, pester her for advice about their sore backs and painful knees. I was less sure about Pretty Is (Orion, [pound]12.99), the debut of English professor Maggie Mitchell. It takes an original premise, only to smother it in so much metatextual Marmite that you lose sight of it altogether. Two 12-year-old girls, Lois and Carly, are abducted by a man called Zed who keeps them captive but doesn't seriously harm them. After their rescue, the pair disappear back into their own lives. Lois becomes an English professor, Carly an actor. But then Lois writes a schlocky thriller based on her experiences, Deep in the Woods. This thriller, which Mitchell incorporates into Pretty Is, is optioned for film and a script sent, without Lois's knowledge, to Carly, who immediately recognises the story's origin. What is going on? Mitchell is less interested in the abduction than in its narrative legacy for Lois and Carly. The result is smart but exhausting. - John O'Connell.
Kirkus Review
In Mitchell's debut, two lonely 12-year-old girls develop strong feelings for the man who abducted them. Their captor, whom they call Zeb, keeps the girls hidden in a lodge in the Adirondacks for two months but doesn't physically harm them. He's eventually killed by the police and the girls are returned home. Years later, when they're both nearly 30, Lois and Carly May seem to have recovered from their abductions and lead fulfilling adult lives. Carly May's changed her name to Chloe Savage and has a moderately successful career as an actress, while Lois, a literature professor in upstate New York, also has an alternate identity. Using the pseudonym Lucy Ledger, she's written a thriller about two kidnapped girls. The book is successful enough to be turned into a movie, and the role of the detective who develops an unhealthy obsession with the intriguing kidnapper goes to none other than Chloe Savage. Chloe, of course, recognizes the plot as her story and begins to revisit her memories of Zeb and their days in the lodge, where the two girls bonded and competed subtly for Zeb's affections. While the story sounds convoluted, it's an interesting and unexpected exploration of the aftermath of an abduction that left invisible scars. At one point, Lois refers to a literary argument that "fiction should adhere to a standard of probability, rather than possibility." Everything about this novel defies probability. By the time Lois and Chloe meet again to talk about their past, many unbelievable things have happened, but this is a novel about stories, truth, and reinvention more than it is a logical thriller about a kidnapping. The voices of the two women are distinctive, each sharp and witty in her own way. A satisfying, unusual novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
When they were both 12, Lois and Carly May were abducted and held captive in an abandoned cabin in the Adirondack woods for two months by a handsome stranger they named Zed. It's now 20 years after that event, and Lois, a professor at a small college, and Carly May, an actress known as Chloe Savage, are still sorting out their lives. They're also about to meet again; Lois's screenplay based on their experience will star Chloe/Carly as a detective. Mitchell's debut combines psychological suspense and literary fiction with well-drawn, believable protagonists who alternate as narrators. The story is strongest when we go inside the young women's minds as they grapple with their shared past; it's less credible when they confront the present. The author mostly avoids clichés (despite one heroine heading for academe and the other for Hollywood), but supporting characters are not fleshed out, and the conclusion is a bit too neat and abrupt. The inclusion of Lois's novelization of the girls' trauma and the lack of backstory or point of view for Zed are compelling choices that at times confound readers but show some daring. VERDICT Despite drawbacks here, Mitchell is on her way to a place at the femmes fatales fiction dais with Megan -Abbott, Gillian Flynn, Tana French, and Sharon Bolton. [See Prepub Alert, 1/12/15.]-Liz French, Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.