Pretty Baby
By: Mary Kubica
Rating: 5 of 5
“Pretty Baby” is a book that got inside my head – both during the time I was reading it and for days afterward. In odd moments, I would start thinking about what I had read and pondering it, both good and bad moments, as if it were something that had happened to someone I actually knew. For an author to have such an impact on me is very unusual. Especially in a good that is anything but “feel good”. Some of the scenarios played out in the story may haunt my waking hours and dreams for some time to come. This is not a horror book but rather a book in which some very traumatic events occur.
The book is told in first person present tense and is told by three different voices. This hits all of the things I don’t like when reading a book, so my first thoughts were that I was not going to be able to enjoy it. However, within the first 30 pages or so, I had changed my mind. I was so caught up in the story that I was able to see beyond the tense and the fact that I had to occasionally check to see whose story I was reading.
The three main characters are Heidi, a wife/mother and social worker who works primarily with the disadvantaged immigrants who surface in her area of Chicago; Chris, her husband who is a banker who specializes in acquisitions and who rarely looks or seems to care much about anyone besides himself; and, finally, Willow, the teenager who Heidi finds living on the streets of Chicago with a four month old female infant. When Heidi invites Willow and her child, Ruby, to stay with her family, the scene is set for the events that are so unexpected. Both Heidi and Chris tell there story as the events occur. Willow tells her in retrospect at a point in the future. What seems fairly innocent but perhaps traumatic to Chris’s well-being (having homeless in the house) becomes so much more because of what has happened to each individual in the past.
The characters are believable and, in some cases especially in Willow’s past, the things of which nightmares are made. The plot is interesting and unusual. The story will stay with me for a long time. I recommend the book for any adult and I will certainly go back to purchase Ms. Kubica’s first book “The Good Girl” and will look for more books by her in the future.
I received a complimentary copy of this book via the publisher.
“Pretty Baby” is a book that got inside my head – both during the time I was reading it and for days afterward. In odd moments, I would start thinking about what I had read and pondering it, both good and bad moments, as if it were something that had happened to someone I actually knew. For an author to have such an impact on me is very unusual. Especially in a good that is anything but “feel good”. Some of the scenarios played out in the story may haunt my waking hours and dreams for some time to come. This is not a horror book but rather a book in which some very traumatic events occur.