Pretty Is: A Novel

· Sold by Henry Holt and Company
4.0
4 reviews
Ebook
320
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

"[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.

Ratings and reviews

4.0
4 reviews
Jordan Adams
September 20, 2015
A great book about two women some years after being abducted! The imagery is amazing, the characters are totally different than one another, and the third person section is so great. AMAZING BOOK!!!
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Ryann Burns
October 9, 2017
All in all it was a pretty good read. Intriguing plot to say the least. The ending was a bit unsatisfying but I have yet to read a debut novel that has nail it.
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About the author

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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