Pretty Girl-13 Review

TITLE Pretty Girl-13
AUTHOR Liz Coley
PUBLICATION March 19th 2013 by Katherine Tegen Books
READ March 19 to 20, 2013
SOURCE HarperTeen via Edelweiss for review

Reminiscent of the Elizabeth Smart case, Pretty Girl-13 is a disturbing and powerful psychological mystery about a girl who must piece together the story of her kidnapping and captivity.

Angie Chapman was thirteen years old when she ventured into the woods alone on a Girl Scouts camping trip. Now she's returned home…only to find that it's three years later and she's sixteen-or at least that's what everyone tells her.

What happened to the past three years of her life?

Angie doesn't know.

But there are people who do — people who could tell Angie every detail of her forgotten time, if only they weren't locked inside her mind. With a tremendous amount of courage, Angie embarks on a journey to discover the fragments of her personality, otherwise known as her "alters." As she unearths more and more about her past, she discovers a terrifying secret and must decide: When you remember things you wish you could forget, do you destroy the parts of yourself that are responsible?

Liz Coley's alarming and fascinating psychological mystery is a disturbing - and ultimately empowering page-turner about accepting our whole selves, and the healing power of courage, hope, and love.

What a riot reading this book was! I have to say that I was surprised to check Goodreads and see that this book clocks in at just over 350 pages after reading my egalley. I breezed through Pretty Girl-13 so fast that I thought for sure it would be in the 200 page range. A story that plays games with your mind and keeps you wondering what will happen just around the corner with every page, this is not one to be missed for sure.

Angie went missing on a Girl Scout campout when she was just 13 years old. Her parents exhausted all of their resources searching for her and right when they were about to give up hope, she re-appears. This is 3 years later, she is now 16 years old and remembers absolutely nothing of the last 3 years. According to her she just came home from the campout and is still 13 year old Angie. As the story unfolds it becomes a really great psychological thriller that I felt unraveled at just the perfect pace. One complaint that I do have, however, is that the novels glaring parallels to a certain TV show (that I can’t name for fear of spoilers) made it all a bit too predictable (DM me if you want me to extrapolate). I do have to say that not a lot ended up taking me by surprise and I figured out much of what happened chapters before it was revealed, but nevertheless I had such a good time reading this that it didn’t hinder my reading experience too much.

Angie was way more levelheaded for someone who went through what she did than I could have ever imagined. All throughout the story she was able to joke about what she had gone through, I guess this is thanks to her “amnesia”. She didn’t know how to feel about anything because she had no first hand idea about what actually happened to her. She does find herself in a bit of a romance and while the guy who ends up being her love interest was a bit cheesy and cutesy for me, he was still so sweet and I could see how that was just what Angie needed in her life at the time. She also finds a great friend in Kate, who was very supportive of her. I’m not entirely sure that with all the things that happened to her everyone would have been so flippant about it all, including Angie, but for some reason the tone of the story worked.

There isn’t too much I can talk about plot-wise here because pretty much anything that I mention would be a spoiler. So just know that this is a really good psychological thriller that keeps you turning the pages at an extremely fast pace. I couldn’t take in this book fast enough, and even though I always saw exactly what was coming, I had so much fun reading it.