Review: Pretty

Bebe is a recovering drug addict mourning the death of her boyfriend. In the space of a year Bebe's life has gone from looking towards a promising future to marking time in a rehab facility and slacking her way through cosmetology school.

While the book is really about Bebe's efforts to come to terms with her boyfriend's death in an accident that left her with significant physical scars too, I found Bebe's efforts to recover from drug addiction more interesting. I am not especially interested in the music industry, and Bebe's boyfriend, Aaron, was a musician. The parts of the book that look at life before the accident seemed to be wound up in music industry stuff that simply wasn't very interesting to a reader who was not similarly invested.

I had previously read Lauren's memoir, Some Girls, and I can say that I definitely preferred her non-fiction to her fiction. I never managed to care all that much about the characters in this book. Bebe, and particularly Aaron, bored me.

Jillian Lauren, Pretty (Plume, 2011) ISBN: 0452297346