Review: Pretty Girl Thirteen Liz Coley

Okay, what if one day, you forgot the past three years of your life? What if, suddenly, you found yourself with the body of a seventeen year old? What happened? Where have you been? And why do your parents keep saying that you have been missing for the past three years? That is the premise of Pretty Girl Thirteen, a heart wrenching YA novel by Liz Coley. As anyone who has read my novella, Best Forgotten knows, partial or selective amnesia is a topic that I find quite interesting. Consequently, I was quite interested to see how this one pans out.

It could have been better, it could have been worse.

There is some really gut wrenching stuff in here that was quite hard for me to read. As I found out more and more of what happened to Angie and how her amnesia took place, as well as some of the events in her life that preceded it, I felt quite sad. Multiple personality disorder is a subject that isn't often discussed YA fiction and some of the experimental treatments (i.e. probably not performed in real life,) that Angie takes to 'erase' three of her six personalities quite difficult to read about. There seemed to be other medical inaccuracies in the book as well--how could the doctors who performed a very thorough examination of her not have noticed that she had given birth to a child? But all of that said, the novel remains interesting and the characters likeable. I appreciated the way that Angie made choices that were best for her and not those that would have made her popular among her peers. The point the author of was trying to make is how a teenage girl could find a way to survive in the most horrific of circumstances and the aftermath of her survival and that makes for interesting, though not perfect, reading. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more