Pretty Girl ~ Review

Title: Pretty Girl

Author: Amy Heugh

Publication Date: July 29, 2014

Pages: 393

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Trigger warning

Rating: 1 star

Summary: If there were one day that she could change it would be the day she was taken. 

After her parents’ divorce, seventeen-year-old Izzy Scott and her mother move to the old town of St. Augustine to begin a new life, a life beyond the media attention and the memories of the traumatic experiences that left an everlasting affect on their family. 
The former ballerina is trying to adjust to the outside world without suffering a panic attack and exposing who she is - all while getting through her senior year at a new school. That’s easy to say until she meets local boy Mason Winchester, a boy with a tragic past. 

Mason has a reputation for violence, but a love for motorcycles. At the age of eleven he lost his mother to cancer and from then he has been running from something, but could never really get away.  

Like any other angry teenager, he just wants to be left alone and to have nothing to do with anyone else because he believed that he had nothing to offer. That changes the moment he saw what was in the new girl eyes. 

Tragedy wasn't new to either of their lives but among the secrets and the memories the one thing they both never excepted was to find hope. 

Did you read that summary? That's the book. There it is, pretty much all of it. Do you notice the way that it's written? That's also how the book reads. I'm sure you're thinking "well, it can't be that bad." Oh how naive you are, my dear. 

Page after page of this nonsense drove me insane. If it weren't for my book resolution to not have one book end up on my DNF shelf this year, this book would be on it. In the span of two chapters I was completely bored, already knew what the big "mystery" was behind Izzy's scarred past, and found the thoughts of both our MC's to be completely unrealistic. 

After informing our coquettish waiter of my unwelcomed filamentous biomaterial...

And that's both the characters "voice." An unending stream of thought vomit with SAT words thrown in for funsies I guess. 

I can get over all the typos, past/present tense inconsistencies, and ridiculous word choices if the story is good. Unfortunately for this error-riddled book, I found it lacking in all aspects. There was a lot of telling, and not enough showing. There was also this really bad habit of bringing up an aspect of Izzy right before it affected the story and characters. Like really? Her brother, for instance, there is absolutely no mention of him for pretty much the first 70% of the story. I thought he was dead. No really, I though he died tragically. All of the sudden we find out that she talks to him every day. Excuse me? Oh wait, five pages later and he shows up for a surprise visit. Well that's super nice of him! It's also really convenient that we learned  more about him five pages ago.

I wish I had more positive things to say about Pretty Girl. The story is there, but it's deeply buried under a lot of other sub-plots (which do nothing for the story), unneeded commentary, and ridiculous characterization. I did put a trigger warning under genre as it does contain sexual abuse, violence, profanity and psycho-babble.