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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.
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.
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Reviews
"[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 magnificently complex, psychologically enthralling, and intelligently disturbing debut novel . . . . Pretty Is reveals itself to be far more than a breathlessly entertaining read. It's a work of sly and seductive brilliance. . . . Mitchell gives us what every real thriller, mystery, and psychologically compelling work promises but few deliver: a searching look into our own worst fears about wha
Psychology Today
"Mitchell knows what she's doing. As she patiently parcels out details about the abduction, she explores the horrifying yet magnetic grip such traumas have on our lives and imaginations. . . . Gone Girl has primed us for female leads with dark pasts, but Mitchell's novel is an original and haunting page-turner about the emotional shocks that come with--literally--rewriting your history."
O, the Oprah Magazine, "Page-Turners Too Addictive to Put Down"