Angie disappeared three years ago at age 13 from her Girl Scout camp, but she’s returned to her house with no memory of where she’s been nor that three years have passed. She has to, though, in order to not only put the person who kidnapped her behind bars, as well as to bring peace and comfort to the detective on the case, her parents, her former friends, and most importantly, herself.
It will be anything but easy.
A word of warning from here on out: this review is spoiler heavy. I can’t review Liz Coley’s Pretty Girl-13 without giving away what does and doesn’t work. This is a psychological thriller, so much of the plot depends upon the plot twists and therefore, the spoiler-laden elements.
The book opens with a flashback to Angie, age 13, when she was kidnapped from the woods. It’s from the third-person perspective but the way in which it’s told, it’s clear there is more than one voice telling the story. That’s because Angie suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). The trauma from her captivity forced her mind to compartmentalize the abuse, meaning that now, three years later, she’s unable to piece together a full picture of what happened to her. She can hardly recall what’s happening to her in the present because at any given time, one of the identities may be coming through stronger than another.
Angie’s taken to therapy immediately and receives the diagnosis. While it terrifies her, she comes to realize that if she can channel the other voices through — much as they scare her — she can figure out what happened. There are a number of different voices brought up through Angie’s therapy sessions and outside of therapy, including the Slut (she submitted to the captor sexually to keep him happy and quiet), the Girl Scout (she was the one chained to the small room and who would cook and do the captor’s work for him outside the bedroom), Angel (the male voice who was full of anger and bitterness for being captured and treated as a prisoner against will), and others. There is one voice that breaks through at the very end of the book, which is that of the baby Angie bore for her captor. The same baby which happens to be the child Angie babysits for now in the real world. The coincidence there is, indeed, ridiculous.
As a reader, I knew what was going on by page three of the story. I think I’ve talked about how a lot of psychological thrillers are easy for me to guess the driving force behind the story, but this was one of the most obvious examples in a long time. There’s more than one voice directing Angie when she’s captured. Could it be anything other than compartmentalization? Maybe it’s because I’m an adult and have read a ton of books like this or because I’ve watched so many of these stories play out in the real world. Maybe it’s because my background is in psychology with an emphasis in adolescent development. I can spot the disorder quite easily. I could have accepted it, actually, had the story been stronger and more compelling. Unfortunately, in this case, it’s not.
Following the diagnosis and therapy sessions (including a very experimental one), Angie is still working through adjusting to normal life again. As such, she has to choose where to go to school. She was supposed to be in 8th grade when she disappeared, and when she came back, she’d be in 11th. But because she doesn’t want to reconnect and feel weird around her old friends, she chooses to start in 9th grade. She still connects with her old friends, though, and she learns they’re not the same as they used to be. Did you read that? She went back to the same school she was known at for being the girl who went missing, and no one is any wiser! She doesn’t change her name or anything. There’s a little explanation for why she doesn’t go somewhere new (price of a private school is too high and her parents won’t be moving) and it’s possible to buy into. What is impossible to buy into, though, is how there is absolutely no media attention. No one is trying to sell this story. No one is outing this girl. Why didn’t her parents move? There’s a small moment when Angie finds a scrapbook with news clippings, but beyond that, there is maybe one phone call for a press interview. When Angie returns, it’s absurd to think there’s no news crew, no people trying to make a buck, and no interest in telling the gripping story of a girl who went missing and suddenly appeared back.
Then there’s a boy. Angie is, of course, falling in love with a boy at school. And it’s through him she finds the security and comfort to tell the truth in the last part of the book. This is done through a tremendously underwhelming infodump, wherein we learn that Angie not only suffers from DID, but she also suffers from Stockholm Syndrome. That was the final straw for me as a reader in terms of believability. I hadn’t even gotten to the surprise baby plot line. I haven’t delved into the fact that Angie’s mom is also pregnant, so there’s a whole series of issues complicating Angie’s return there. I also haven’t mentioned the subplot with Angie’s uncle — he’d been making sexual advances on her for years prior to her being captured and taken, and it’s when her DID is in deep treatment Angie can finally speak up about it. While there’s something to be said about the uncle’s role in her initial descent into compartmentalization, it was more of the One Thing Too Many trend that further made the story ridiculous. It’s hard to develop a sense of character when they are little more than tools of syndroms and tools of their situations. What Angie experiences is horrific, and yet, as a reader I never once felt that because what was going on ranged from ridiculous to far-too-coincidental.
Pretty Girl-13 doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It takes elements of a number of well-written novels on these issues and doesn’t marry them successfully. The story of a girl taken and abused by a captor but who eventually makes her way out to tell the story? It was done well in Elizabeth Scott’s Living Dead Girl. The issue of DID was done in Brian James’s Life is But a Dream to the extent that the main character’s mental illness makes the reader question the entire story itself and all she experiences. Stockholm Syndrome is done expertly in Lucy Christopher’s Stolen. And Nova Ren Suma manages to tell a tale of mental illness (not DID but a similar illness) in 17 & Gone and even more successfully uses the metaphor of fire to actually enhance the story and character, rather than simply using it as an exit from the story, as Coley does here. As far as familial sexual abuse, there’s Mindi Scott’s Living Dead Girl. In short: any of these titles tackle the subjects of Pretty Girl-13 in much more depth, honesty, and immediacy than Coley’s title does.
One aspect of the book that did work quite well and I applaud Coley for was how Angie ultimately comes to work through her DID and make herself one complete Angie. This means that she accepts being Angie involves being part “slut,” being part “girl scout,” being part “Angel,” and being part mother. She’s a female who has the agency to express herself sexually if she wants, and she has the agency to be angry and violent if need be. The therapeutic technique used in the book doesn’t require that Angie forget those other voices inside her. Instead, it forces Angie to embrace these voices as part of who she is. They’re pieces of a whole. Her wholeness means she is a little bit of all those things.
Will this book find a readership? Absolutely. It’s a sexy subject. It’s unfortunate that rather than offering readers a full character and a full arc, we’re given a list of challenges and info dumps meant to suffice for strong development. This is a debut, and it feels like one because it’s sloppy, a little overindulgent, and misses the mark on crucial elements of story development. I felt cheated because I’d figured out the story from the start, but I felt further cheated the more I read. In concept, Pretty Girl-13 sounds appealing. It lacks in execution and for that, it’s a disappointing and unsatisfying read.
Pretty Girl-13 is available now from Harper Collins. Review copy received from the publisher.