Saturday, May 16, 2015

2015 book 124

Maggie Mitchell's Pretty Is
I'm so disappointed with this one--the premise was really interesting, and it started off so strong, and then it just ENDED. Like I expected a few more chapters wrapping things up, answering some questions (but not all of them), and it just stopped so abruptly. Anyway, it's the story of two women who, when they were twelve, were kidnapped and held for six weeks before being rescued. Now one is a college professor, who, under a nom de plume, has written a slightly fictionalized novel about her experience, and the other is an actress, who's been hired to act in the movie version of said novel. The book takes way too long to bring them together, though their meditations on their lives and that summer are really well done. And meanwhile, one of the professor's students is acting suuuuuper creepy, adding a thriller element to something that seems like it wants to be a literary novel (I'm honestly not sure which genre this is supposed to belong to, if any), and she's amazingly stupid about the whole thing. Mitchell does a great job building the two main characters and building tension, but I really needed a lot more from the ending. B.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in July.

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