Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the electronic advanced reader’s copy. All opinions expressed below are my opinions.

Plot Summary:

There’s something out there that’s killing. Known only as The Cur, he leaves no traces, save for the torn bodies of girls, on the verge of becoming women, who are known as trouble-makers; those who refuse to conform, to know their place. Girls who don’t know when to shut up.

2019: Thirteen-year-old Lila Sawyer has secrets she can’t share with anyone. Not the school psychologist she’s seeing. Not her father, who has a new wife, and a new baby. And not her mother—the infamous Caroline Sawyer, a unique artist whose eerie sculptures, made from bent twigs and crimped leaves, have made her a local celebrity. But soon Lila feels haunted from within, terrorized by a delicious evil that shows her how to find her voice—until she is punished for using it.

2004: Caroline Sawyer hears dogs everywhere. Snarling, barking, teeth snapping that no one else seems to notice. At first, she blames the phantom sounds on her insomnia and her acute stress in caring for her ailing father. But then the delusions begin to take shape—both in her waking hours, and in the violent, visceral sculptures she creates while in a trance-like state. Her fiancé is convinced she needs help. Her new psychiatrist waives her “problem” away with pills. But Caroline’s past is a dark cellar, filled with repressed memories and a lurking horror that the men around her can’t understand.

As past demons become a present threat, both Caroline and Lila must chase the source of this unrelenting, oppressive power to its malignant core. Brilliantly paced, unsettling to the bone, and unapologetically fierce, Such a Pretty Smile is a powerful allegory for what it can mean to be a woman, and an untamed rallying cry for anyone ever told to sit down, shut up, and smile pretty.

Review:

Two warnings as I get into this review.

1. I won’t go into details, because spoilers, but don’t read this if you’re a dog lover.

2. This book is graphic.

When I first started reading this book, I was little confused. We have the main characters, Caroline and Lila, a mother and daughter pair that seem completely detached from each other. Throughout the story they seem completely unaware and unsympathetic to each other, some of which is attributed to Caroline’s (the mother) mental illness. Part of this seemed so unrealistic to me. Lila is clearly a character struggling with puberty and who she is, but she has no healthy outlet. Her one friend, Macie, is objectively terrible. She uses Lila and manipulates her friendship to get Lila to do things she normally wouldn’t do. Instead of talking to her mom at any point she just bottles it all up. Her mom almost never makes any attempt to relate to her daughter or bond with her. Some of which seems realistic because she’s a teenager and she doesn’t want to seem “crazy” like her mom. Even then it just seemed unrealistic that they would have almost no bonding moments throughout the whole book.

As the story progresses, Lila begins to experience strange visions of a man, hearing dogs barking that aren’t there, and other spooky going ons. She starts to learn more about her mother’s past and that her mother experienced some of the same symptoms. We jump back and forth between Lila and Caroline, with Caroline’s story mostly being told as what happened in the past. The past focuses on Caroline and her experience with the same symptoms and navigating her complex relationship with Daniel, Lila’s dad while living in pre-Katrina New Orleans.

The backbone of this whole story is predicated on men controlling women, mostly through subtle or overt emotional manipulation and abuse. That being a good woman, means being submissive to men. I found this to be the most believe part of the story, as this is something women experience every day. The sinister aspect of real people in your life who love and care about you, putting their needs above yours and willingly minimizing your experiences was well written and heartbreaking.

Overall I wish the supernatural aspects of this story were better fleshed out and that the mother-daughter relationship was better defined. The ending was mildly predictable and while the story did have enjoyable parts, I just felt like it could have been better developed.