REVIEW: Pretty Girl-13

By Denise @ Life With No Plot on July 11, 2024 • ( 1 )

About the Book

Title: Pretty Girl-13

Author: Liz Coley

Series: none

Genre: Psychological/Thriller/Mystery

Pages: 344

Edition Read: Hardcover

Dates Read: June 6-9, 2024

Blurb: When thirteen-year-old Angela Gracie Chapman looks in the mirror, someone else looks back–a thin, pale stranger, a sixteen-year-old with haunted eyes. Angie has no memory of the past three years, years in which she was lost to the authorities, lost to her family and friends, lost even to herself. Where has she been, who has been living her life, and what is hiding behind the terrible blankness? There are secrets you can’t even tell yourself.

With a tremendous amount of courage and support from unexpected friends, Angie embarks on a journey into the darkest corners of her mind. 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 people responsible, or is there another way to feel whole again?

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.

Review

I went into this book completely blind. It was a gift during the TBTB Secret Santa one year and, honestly, I’m not sure why I got it. Usually gifts are picked from a wish list and I had never heard of this book or this author. It’s not the type of book that I typically read anyway.

That said . . . holy crap, you guys, this book was amazing.

By amazing, I mean terrifying. This author writes this character so well. She is mentally a thirteen year old stuck in a sixteen year old body with no memory AT ALL of the three years in between. Think about how many things change in those three years. So much! You find out early on that she was abducted by a man and kept captive in a shack in the woods. You can probably guess the sorts of things that happened to her and this trauma is the reason she can’t remember it.

But it’s even more than that. Angie also has parts of her current day where she can’t remember things happening. Things move around in her room without her remembering moving any of them. She is diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (DID) and eventually, through her recovery and treatment, get to meet the other alternate personalities that were able to compartmentalize her experiences during captivity. I found this incredibly interesting, especially since I follow a woman on Instagram who also has DID and talks about her experiences with her alters and how she lives with it (her account is called Gianu System and is really informative).

It made me realize how well Coley did her research on this particular diagnosis, although the treatment/recovery seemed a bit rushed at the end. I always really admire authors who put in the work to make their fiction as real as possible. In going through therapy and meeting Angie’s alters one by one, you start to piece together what actually happened to her, including a twist that I did not see coming and that was completely heartbreaking but also very healing in its own way.

GoodReads rating: 5 stars