Pretty Is
A gripping, dark and superbly suspenseful psychological thriller
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Everyone thought we were dead...
Two girls went missing - and now the truth is coming back to haunt them...
Lois and Carly-May were just twelve when they were abducted by a stranger and imprisoned in a cabin in the woods for two months.
That summer, under the watchful gaze of their kidnapper, they formed a bond that would never be broken.
Decades later, both women have new lives and identities. But the events of that summer are about to come back with a vengeance.
Lois and Carly-May must face the truth about their secret, shared past...
What really happened in the woods that summer?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
