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Published Jul 2015
320 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
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.
"Psychologically rich, with haunting detail, Mitchell's work is a disturbing, insightful look at our deep fears." - Publishers Weekly
"Mitchell is on her way to a place at the femmes fatales fiction dais with Megan Abbott, Gillian Flynn, Tana French, and Sharon Bolton." - Library Journal
"A daring psychological thriller... I could not turn the pages fast enough. A wickedly good debut novel." - Elin Hilderbrand, author of The Rumor and Barefoot
"The best book of its kind I've read since Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin ... A powerful plot that keeps the tension bubbling and the reader's attention rapt, written by a natural-born storyteller blessed with emotional intelligence and sheer deftness of language." - Fay Weldon, author of Habits of the House
":Mitchell's fresh, spectacular, and bristly heroines illuminate this story of a crime survived. Pretty Is promises mountains of suspense, while offering a transfixing look at the urge to give voice, to make art." - Amity Gaige, author of Schroder: A Novel
"Pretty Is announces an exceptional new voice in fiction. By turns poignant, funny, and terrifying, Pretty Is mines the contradictions of the heart with fascinating skill. The relationships in this novel are ones you have not seen before." - Leslie Daniels, author of Cleaning Nabokov's House
"Maggie Mitchell has a wonderful style-combining classic thriller techniques with those of literary fiction to create a novel that spools out like a ribbon. " - Jo-Ann Mapson, LA Times bestselling author of Solomon's Oak, Finding Casey, and Owen's Daughter
"Intriguing and suspenseful, surprising and smart ... a riveting drama that stays with the reader long after the last page is turned." - Jessica Treadway, author of Lacy Eye
This information about Pretty Is was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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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