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.
I was granted eARC access to Such a Pretty Smile via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review and chose to read it during 2021’s run of the Spooktober readathon to fulfill the “read a slasher” task. My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.
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About the Book
Such a Pretty Smile
by Kristi DeMeester
Publishing 18 January 2022
St. Martin’s Press
Genre: Horror
Page Count: 320
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!
A biting novel from an electrifying new voice, Such a Pretty Smile is a heart-stopping tour-de-force about powerful women, angry men, and all the ways in which girls fight against the forces that try to silence them.
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 waves 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.
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My Review
My Rating: 3.5 Stars
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I was granted eARC access to Such a Pretty Smile via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review and chose to read it during 2021’s run of the Spooktober readathon to fulfill the “read a slasher” task. My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.
Such a Pretty Smile is a creepy, weird, and compelling novel that’s hard to categorize. It’s horror but it’s also a bit urban fantasy or possibly dark magical realism. The concept of the same paranormal horror coming for both mother and daughter nearly 2 decades apart is fascinating, and I have a serious love/hate relationship with how the world passes it off as and convinces these women that they’re suffering from mental illness.
With that said, it took quite a while to get a feel for which POV I was reading at any given point. Whenever we’re reading the mother’s POV we’ve travelled back in time to before the daughter’s existence, just a little older than the daughter is in the present, and there isn’t a whole lot of technology or pop culture mentioned in one time period or the other to really set them apart. If you don’t have the names straight yet you’re relying on the differences between these two characters are individuals, and frankly they’re extremely similar. 2019 Lila and 2004 Caroline are pretty much the same person. I found the flip-flopping to be very disorienting, and if this wasn’t the book I’d chosen to fulfill the last task for the readathon in the last week of the month, I might have given up and DNFd about 25-30% in.
I’m glad I pushed through because eventually I did get used to who’s who and enjoy the mystery. The ending was somewhat satisfying in terms of getting an answer as to what the heck has been going on with these women the whole time, but (without getting too specific to avoid spoilers) we also get a huge deus ex machine character introduction right at the very end to help tie up strings that left me feeling like the majority of this book didn’t have to happen if certain characters had found each other much, much earlier. Like 2004.
Overall I’m calling this a 3.5, rounding up to 4 for Goodreads and retailer sites because I do think it deserves props for being rather unique. Also, once again not going to explain myself due to spoilers, but if others who’ve also read this book come across this review please let me know whether or not you agree there seems to be a loose cicada inspiration here. I hope other readers who’ve finished will get that.
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Want more? Check out my review of The Dead and the Dark by Courtney Gould.
Interesting, didn’t know about this one yet.