Book review: Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell

Identity, memory, self-worth and desire - all are at the core of Maggie Mitchell's beguiling novel Pretty Is.

When Carly May and Lois were 12 years old they were kidnapped. Missing for two months, everyone presumed they were dead, until they were rescues. Now grown up, Carly May has changed her name and is pursuing an acting career, while Lois has written a book fictionalising what happened to the two girls during the time they were kidnapped. When Carly May is cast in the lead role of the film adaptation of Lois' book, the two women are brought back together again. What really happened to them when they were 12, how has it affected them, and is there still a threat to their lives?

In Carly May, known as Chloe in the present time, and Lois, Mitchell has created two complicated female characters who I spent the entire book trying to unpick, and who spent the two months they were kidnapped trying to unpick each other, and the years since then trying to both forget each other and make sense of each other. It's easy to think that it was just the kidnapping which affected Carly May and Lois so badly, impacting on the rest of their lives, but Mitchell shows through glimpses of their home life that the kidnapping only exacerbated the girls' feelings of otherness and exclusion, that feeling that maybe there was something special about them, and that's why they never fit in, and that's why they were chosen by their kidnapper.