Review: Pretty Girl - 13

Book: Pretty Girl-13
By: Liz Coley
Published: March 19, 2013
Published By: Katherine Tegen Books

Description: 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

My Thoughts: Holy freaking crap this book was good, but good in a really messed up way. I dont want to give up too many details so I'll just say a little

We follow Angie, a girl who has just turned up on her street after a camping trip, but only, she's 16, not 13 like she was when whe went camping, and she has no idea what happened in the last 3 years. Slowly we see the loss of time. The breaks in events as Angie tunes in an out of things and originally she has no idea what's going on. She's missing time with her family, losing sleep and feeling things she shouldn't. Soon she realizes due to some traumatic events, her mind has created multiple personalities to preserve her original self. That's it, that's all I'm saying about the plot...just know you should read it.

This book tore me apart, and then patched me up only to tear me apart again. There were so many feelings. so many things that happened that I almost felt like I needed a different personality just to deal with the book. It was great and amazing and filled with happy times, and bad times, and times in between. It was haunting, kind of like a ghost story but not quite. It was scary, not in a terrifying sort of way, but a how can she deal with all this sort of way and makes you think in depth of the power of the human brain.

I'll admit, this book didnt originally interest me. In fact, I only got it because it was on someone's list as the best book ever, and still, I let it sit in my library bag until it was almost due. But once I started the book, I couldnt get enough. This review doesnt even do it justice, but there's nothing else for me to say

Do yourself a favor and read this one, now. Its just that good! My review? 5 BIG stars!

RRT: The Hatred of Ellie Watt (of The Artists Trilogy)

Hey Guys!!! This will be a regular old post for now. I havent decided if I'll be doing a video for my YouTube page but we'll see. If I do, I'll post a link here.
I just got finished reading this post over on The Experiment in Terror Official Site page talking about the backlash from women about the character of Ellie Watt; liar, thief, con-artist, and 100% bad-ass from the Artists trilogy. (See My review for the first book, Sins & Needles, here.) It seems women pretty much hate everything about her, all of her decisions they hate. Even the one bug huge decision at the end they hate; the one that shows that maybe, perhaps, Ellie Watt is attempting to be a better person. To some women readers, her decision is selfish, and in some ways maybe it is. Regardless, the decision is made.

I really dont understand the backlash. As Karina Halle, Author of the Sins & Needles book, said, we love our male characters to be bad boys. They can lie, cheat, steal, kill, rape, abuse, and do pretty much anything else and as long as they have rippling abs and sexy dark eyes and decide not to kill the one damsel in distress, they're officially swoon worthy. Excuse my language, but What the Hell? Seriously. How is Ellie this horrible person because she's made bad decisions whereas the guys are completely sexy and gorgeous? Double Standard anyone?

It's my belief that there are little bits of Ellie in all of us women. Maybe that's why it's so hard for some women to accept her. We all put on these innocent fronts for everyone around us of being good little girls who always do the right thing and only want to fall in love and blah-de-blah-de blah. We act like we would never do anything wrong, like we never lie, or cheat. We spend our time pretending we dont think badly of ourselves as Ellie does, that we dont always deserve the perfect life for our mistakes, and we therefore make even more mistakes. We act like there hasn't been a time when we hear our conscience screaming at us to just do the right thing. That this time you probably shouldn't do that one bad thing you always do, because this time you may just get caught, but you do it anyway, and stupidly you get caught. Sure our actual events may not be as serious as Ellie's or as dangerous and damaging, but still, I think we're more like her than we know. We just grew up in a different situation.

We all have skeletons that not even our closest friends know about. Yet we prefer books where the guy is the bad-boy and women are the good girls because it ensures that no one knows our secret. It ensures that no one knows that women can sometimes be just as bad, if not worse, than all those sexy men we love in the books.

I love Ellie Watt because she shows the good, the bad, and the ugly. She shows our weaknesses, not just as women but as humans in general. She shows our strengths and our ability to go on despite all odds. She show's our innate ability to survive no matter what. Her final decision in book 1 shows the sacrifice we as women make time and time again to protect those we love from getting hurt. No, it may not have been the best decision, but it was the one she could deal with.

I love Ellie Watt, I love Sins and Needles. It's my hope that we as women can see the good in her the same way we can see the good in our male book heros and stop puting her down.

What do you all think about this topic? Do you agree that this may be the reason people put down the character of Ellie Watt or do you think I'm wrong? Could it be that we hold our fellow women to a higher standard than we do men? If so, do you think that's fair?

Message to the Author: (if by some miracle you're actually reading this) Thanks so much for making all your characters as flawed as we as humans really are. It makes your books so much more real and it keeps me hooked!