Pretty Is

When they were 12 years old, Lois and Carly May were abducted from the streets of their respective towns and taken to a cabin in the Adirondacks, where they were held captive for six weeks by a man they knew only as Zed. Now in their early 30s, they have not had any contact since that summer. Lois is an English professor who has written a pseudonymous thriller based on the abduction, and Carly May has become a B-list actress named Chloe Savage, who has just received the script of a new movie based on Lois's novel. Meanwhile, one of Lois's students somehow knows about her past and is showing an unhealthy interest in her. Chloe and Lois agree to meet on the British Columbia set of the movie, where past and present collide in unexpected ways. Alternating between Chloe and Lois's narrations, and between the present-day and their respective memories of that summer, Mitchell's debut novel explores rich the psychological territory of how the protagonists perceived the events of that summer, how it affected their relationships with their families and with each other, and how it marked the course of their lives.