Ever since Emma Donoghue, inspired by the Josef Fritzl case, impressed and horrified in equal measure with Room, there has been a slowly growing trend for thrillers about abducted children. Maggie Mitchell’s debut, Pretty Is, joins a phalanx of fellow kidnap-lit novels out in recent months – The Girl in the Red Coat, How I Lost You, The Boy That Never Was – but stands out for its slick, subversive take on a trope that is showing no signs of going away.
Lois and Carly May, spelling bee champion and beauty pageant queen, are 12 when they are abducted by a man they come to know as Zed. He keeps them in a cabin in the middle of the woods for six weeks before their ordeal comes to an end, providing them with ample copies of old Ruth Rendell and Agatha Christie novels – and, more darkly, Robert Browning’s effortlessly sinister poem Porphyria’s Lover - with which to while away the time, muttering darkly about the corrupt nature of women.
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