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Thursday, July 14, 2011
title: Pretty
author: Jillian Lauren
genre: fiction
published: August 2011
source: ARC from LibraryThing
first line: How I got here the longer version is a longer story than I want to tell.
rated: 3 1/2 out of 5 stars 
About:
Pretty is an edgy novel about a teenage girl named Bebe who leaves home with a musician named Aaron and ends up becoming a stripper and an addict. Aaron and Bebe's partying habits are out of control, they both drink too much and use drugs. One night, after a big fight between the two, Aaron is killed while driving under the influence. Bebe survives the car accident, but finds herself in a rehab facility trying to get her life together.
After she finishes rehab, Bebe goes to live at a halfway house. The house offers free training at a beauty school in order to help its inhabitants better themselves and become functioning members of society.
Throughout the story you get a glimpse of Bebe's life while she finishes up cosmetology school. She starts to date a fellow rehab patient, a paranoid schizophrenic named Jake. Except for her friends, Bebe is alone in the world, her mother being an addict herself and no help to her.
My thoughts:
I found Pretty to start off really interestingly enough. Here is this young woman who has been through alot, nearly dying in a car accident, then going to rehab and trying to get clean.
Then I found the story to fizzle a bit in the middle. I was tired of hearing about Bebe's cosmetology school and the different beauty techniques she was learning.
Her fellow classmates and halfway house inhabitants did interest me as I read. These were characters who had lost their way but banded together to help each other out.
Bebe's new boyfriend Jake was disturbing to read about, especially when he would go on his rants about religion. He is a paranoid schizophrenic who thinks he is Jesus. I found it surprising that Bebe didn't recognize his symptoms as out of control and dangerous while she was dating him.
There are flashbacks throughout the book, but I didn't find them to be confusing, they blended in well with the storyline and gave more of a backdrop as to where Bebe was coming from.
"Pretty" is a main theme as you read. Bebe herself is tall and beautiful, yet is now covered in scars after the car accident.
So now I am a pretty much ex-everything. Ex-Christian, ex-stripper, ex-drug addict, ex-pretty girl. Or rather I am half a pretty girl. I am mostly not so bad from the waist up, but my hands and my legs are a bird's nest of smooth, pink keloid scars.
A bucket of worms is what my legs look like. I keep them covered and try not to think about them, not so much because of vanity as because they remind me of all that's irreparable.
p. 27
I thought this novel was young adult fiction, but after reading it, I'd say it's best for ages seventeen and up. There is graphic language throughout as well as a descriptive stripping scene in one of Bebe's flashbacks.
The story picked up toward the last part of the book, when a few twists are added and I was curious as to how it would all end.
For the most part, a well written plot and interesting characters made Pretty a worthwhile read. This was my first time reading Jillian Lauren and hopefully not my last.
I'll close my review with my favorite passage in the book.
Regret perches like an umbrella over all of my days. All I do is look up and see its spiny inside. An invisible hand grips my heart just a little too tight and squeezes every time a memory washes over me.
p.170
About the author:
Author and performer Jillian Lauren grew up in suburban New Jersey and fled across the water to New York City. She attended New York University for three minutes before dropping out to work in downtown theater, where she performed with Richard Foreman’s Ontological Hysteric Theater, among others.
Her New York Times bestselling memoir, SOME GIRLS: My Life in a Harem, was published by Plume in April 2010. It has since been translated into fourteen different languages.
Her novel, PRETTY, will be released on August 30, 2011.
