Pretty Girl-13 Review (Spoilers)

Amazon

TITLE: Pretty Girl-13

AUTHOR: Liz Coley

PUBLISHER: Katherine Tegen Books (Harper Collins)

PUBLICATION DATE: 3/19/2013

PAGES: 352

MY RATING:

SUMMARY FROM GOODREADS: 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 along 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 out whole selves, and the healing power of courage,  hope, and love.

OVERALL IMPRESSION: This is such a hard review for me to write. The story itself was captivating and intense, but I have trouble actually saying that it was "good" because the subject matter of the story is so terrible. The book sucked me in from the moment I picked it up and I refused to put it down once I got into the story. My heart was pounding the whole way through.

CHARACTERS: This is the part that gets a little spoiler-y. The main character, Angie, was a pretty like-able character. She was a confused and frustrated girl just trying to figure things out. I really liked all of the different alters and I came to think of them as their own characters. I feel like I wanted to learn a little bit more about them, specifically Angel. Girl Scout was my favorite alter. She was very straight forward and had the biggest personality of them all.

COVER: The cover is okay. It symbolizes the story well, but I feel like they could have done it a little differently.

*I received an advanced reader's copy of this book from Amazon Vine for my honest review.