Pretty Is: A Novel
(OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen)
A fiercely inspired fiction debut in which two young women—an actress and an academic—face what really 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
When 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.
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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Maggie Mitchell. (2015). Pretty Is: A Novel. Unabridged Blackstone Publishing.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Maggie Mitchell. 2015. Pretty Is: A Novel. Blackstone Publishing.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Maggie Mitchell, Pretty Is: A Novel. Blackstone Publishing, 2015.
MLA Citation (style guide)Maggie Mitchell. Pretty Is: A Novel. Unabridged Blackstone Publishing, 2015.
Library | Owned | Available |
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Shared Digital Collection | 1 | 1 |
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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.
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A fiercely inspired fiction debut in which two young women—an actress and an academic—face what really 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
When 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.
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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May 11, 2015
Mitchell's debut novel is both a skewering of America's JonBenet Ramseyâstyle 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.
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January 1, 2016
Almost two decades before the start of this novel, two very different little girls were kidnapped from Nebraska and Connecticut and held at a cabin in the Adirondacks for six weeks before being rescued unharmed. But recovering from such trauma is anything but easy and neither girl reconnects totally. As adults, Lois and Carly May alternate their stories and feelings as circumstances and unexpected danger bring them together again. Some motives remain unclear, but ambiguity is used effectively as Mitchell skillfully moves between the two characters, interweaving their pasts and present. Tavia Gilbert and Nichole Zanzarella deliver fine performances, creating an effective counterpoint between the characters. VERDICT Recommended for those who enjoyed Emma Donoghue's Room or Chevy Stevens's Still Missing. ["Despite drawbacks here, Mitchell is on her way to a place at the femmes fatales fiction dais": LJ 6/1/15 review of the Holt hc.]--Janet Martin, Southern Pines P.L., NC
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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A fiercely inspired fiction debut in which two young women—an actress and an academic—face what really 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
When 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...
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