Such a Pretty Smile by Kristi DeMeester
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This story followed two POVs. First we have Lila who lives with her mom in Atlanta. Her mother is smothering her with protection while young girls are going missing. The other POV is from her mother, Caroline, 14 years earlier. She has started hearing things and seeing things that cause her to believe she has suppressed trauma.
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I feel like this book is a book for all the girls who have ever been told by men to “smile” when they have nothing to smile about. For the women who are told to stay in their place and not ask any questions.
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The pacing was done very well in this book and I really wanted to know what was going on.
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I was so frustrated for both Caroline and Lila at certain points. They were both treated poorly and their concerns and stories were dismissed quickly and unfairly.
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I think this story was written very well but it wasn’t really for me. It was good but I didn’t love it. 3⭐️⭐️⭐️

This book was definitely interesting and unlike anything I’ve really read before. ‘Such A Pretty Smile’ is a horror novel written in two POV’s , mother and daughter , with changing timelines. I think it would make a good horror movie !

I Loved the message behind the whole book , how women need to act a certain way in a man’s world and a woman’s fight for power!

The dark horror scenes were everything. Creepy, gritty, disturbing and causing you to nail bite as you read.

This book reminded me of a mix of Zombieland , as there was a creepy carnival where a lot took place, called Jazzland. Paired with a mix of some classic gory body horror movies.

Interesting. Weird. Yet, brilliant!

Thank you so much to St. Martins Press for my advanced E-Copy!

On shelves January 17th, 2022 !

Such a creepy and intense book. Told from two points the author takes you from 2004 and back to 2019. It is told from Carolina and Lila's point of view, mother and daughter. A great way to unfold the story. Nightmares and dark shadows, I wouldn't call this a thriller, more of a suspenseful ride that is intense and creepy.

I would recommend this for anyone that loves gory stephen king novels. A solid 3.5 read.

Such a Pretty Smile
Rating: 2 stars (An okay read)
Thank you to the publisher for providing the ARC through NetGalley for review. All opinions are my own.

Such a Pretty Smile was a little scary and gory at times, but I feel that I was not in to it as I wanted to. I was bored for most of it and it feels that nothing much happened that would make me feel more invested in the story or what happened to the main characters. Though some events that happen are pretty gross and gory, I wanted to know of where all of this was coming from. They kind of tell us why it happened to some girls but it felt like it needed more of a background of how it came about.

Such a Pretty Smile, by Kristi DeMeester

Short Take: An interesting idea that never quite comes together as a story.

(*I voluntarily read and reviewed an advance copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.*)

Hello Duckies! We’re smack dab in the yukky part of winter, when the Christmas lights are gone and the pristine white snow is more like gray sludge. The trees are bare, the sky is gloomy, and I’m already counting down till spring.

In other words, it’s perfect weather for some big meaty books, but oh my beloved nerdlings, this one was mostly fat. The setup is a great one - preteen girls are being murdered, their wounds resembling animal attacks. But it’s not the smart girls or quiet ones or pretty blonde ones, no, these girls are the loudmouths, the troublemakers who will stand up for themselves even if it’s not ladylike.

In the present, Lila Sawyer is one of those girls. She’s tried to be what everyone else wants, but something within her is fighting to get out, and that something isn’t afraid to speak ugly truths. Loudly and in public.

In the past, Lila’s mother Caroline is haunted by sounds and terrors she doesn’t understand, tied to a memory she can’t quite touch.

It’s sad that Ms. DeMeester took such a great foundation and piled a muddled mess on top of it. The prose is too overwrought, all the time. At least every chapter involves some reference to a character feeling as though their insides are melting/liquefying/turning to water, etc. The characters were cliches, and the pacing was unbearable. I like a slow burn as much as anyone, but it took me nearly 2 weeks to get through a 300 page book, and that’s just wrong.

And worst of all, the ending made very little sense. I trudged through that whole thing, and still don’t really get what was going on. I wish the author had spent less time focusing on every character’s every emotion, and more time on telling the actual story.

The Nerd’s Rating: TWO HAPPY NEURONS (and booze. Lots and lots of booze.)

Such a Pretty Smile by Kristi DeMeester

Jan 18


One-sentence summary:
Lila is trying to navigate adolescence when she begins to experience strange things that make her fear that she may be too similar to her mother, an artist who has been diagnosed with a mental disorder because she hears dogs everywhere, and also there’s a serial killer who is mutilating young girls again, in the same way he did back in the past, when Lila’s mother was a child.

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My inability to capture this in one sentence is part of the problem, in my opinion, with the book: there’s too much going on, which leads to a lack of focus. Now, in all fairness, I did DNF this one at the midpoint, so I’m only really reviewing the first half of the book.

Some of the moments with Lila, as an adolescent girl struggling to be accepted, felt incredibly real and poignant and took me back to some moments of my childhood that I hadn’t thought about in years. There’s a real truthfulness, at times, to the writing, which I found very compelling. The writing is strong; my disappointment is with the storytelling.

The main selling point of this book, based on the way it’s being marketed, is the social commentary around the sacrifices women must make within the patriarchy and the punishment they receive for fighting back. While I find feminist theory fascinating, I found the exploration of these notions in this book is too heavy-handed and on-the-nose to be effective. So much focus was given to this commentary, along with the elements of horror that were used to drive home the oppression of the female gender, yet the narrative thread never quite hung together.

There was a lack of clarity about what exactly was happening. By the midpoint, my intuition was telling me that the end wasn’t going to hold any answers either. I’m perfectly fine with ambiguity if the journey or the characters or SOMETHING is interesting enough for me to stay engaged.

Sadly, this one did not work for me, but some fans of horror or feminist fiction may enjoy it.

Thank you St. Martin’s Press for the ARC.

This was an intense and engrossing read. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. I fully support and agree with the message this book conveys about the stress and trauma caused to girls and women growing up under the threat of male violence. But that didn’t make it any easier to read the intense and often unsettling brutality of the book. DeMeester is an incredibly talented writer, and I didn’t know a lot of the time whether this book was pulling me in or pushing me away. Unique, intense, disturbing. It’s hard to rate this book because I can’t say it was an enjoyable read, but it was an effective one. 3.75⭐️ And I would be very interested in this author’s next work.

This book was so bizarre. I really wanted to love this and it totally sounds like something I would enjoy. Unfortunately this one just missed the mark for me, but there were some things I did enjoy about it so I'll get a little into both.

First off, this book was eerie and atmospheric. I loved the gory, graphic elements and depictions of the murders. That part really held up well for me. It was written in a multiple POV, dual timeline format which I usually love, and this was very easy to follow.

Now this is where it starts to get murky for me. I feel like the pacing was off when switching between the timelines. We would just start getting to something exciting and then it would immediately switch to the other timeline at a duller point and the momentum of the thrill got lost in there for me. By the time we got back to the exciting part I found myself a bit uninterested. In between the gory descriptions the rest of the novel read a bit too much like YA for my own personal liking.

If this were a book just about creepy, supernatural creatures I think I would have enjoyed this more. I personally did not care for the "stereotyping women, mental illness, and women should be good, obedient girls." A lot of people loved this factor, but to me it just played out weird.

While this particular story wasn't my favorite, the writing itself was great and I'll be checking out whatever she comes out with next.

Thank you to #netgalley and St. Martin's Press for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review!

Not for me.

Not one bit.

I should have put this down. But I didn't and that's on me. I have a feeling this book is going to be polarizing. Readers are either going to love it or it just won’t work for them. The synopsis was intriguing. Sounded like it would be right up my alley. I enjoy reading dark books. I enjoy disturbing books. I enjoy horror. I did not enjoy this.

Girls are being murdered. Their bodies are being torn apart. The victims are girls who do not always follow the rules, girls you walk to their own beat, girls labeled troublemakers. The Cur is the culprit.

The book is told in two-time frames (2019 and 2004). In 2019, Lilia Sawyer is being raised by her mother, Caroline Sawyer, an artist known for her bizarre and creepy sculptures. Caroline has strict rules for Lilia. The main goal is to remain a good girl. In 2004, young Caroline Sawyer can hear dogs that no one else can hear. She begins to make sculptures in a trance like state. Her doctor prescribes her medications but....

This is a disturbing book to read. There is graphic violence, girls are told to be good girls, because if you are bad/a troublemaker something horrible will happen to you, while teen males and grown men in this book don't seem to have consequences for their behavior.

If I had to describe this book it would be horror with a twist. Again, I think this book will be polarizing. I wasn't a fan of the storytelling.

We can't love them all. There is an audience out there for this book and author. As I stated, many enjoyed this book, and I encourage you to see out their reviews.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own.

Wow! I am speechless. What a crazy book this was? It’s dark, heavy and creepy. It is a paranormal page turner that touches on feminism and mental health. It’s definitely one of the better books – horrors I have read in a while.
Thank you NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press & the author for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

“Both women said there are beasts- they used that specific word, beasts- that take girls. Angry girls. The ones who act up. The ones who can’t be controlled. And these beasts take the girls away to teach them to act right. How to behave. And if the girls don’t learn, the beasts kill them. The women wanted us to understand that the murdered girls we’d been finding were the defiant ones; the ones who didn’t learn how to behave.”

Puberty is a hard time. It sucks. You don’t know what’s going on in your own body, and the hormones cause feelings you don’t know what to do with. This is exactly how 13 year old Lila feels. Her mom won’t let her do anything fun, but at the same time, she’s more interested in her art than her daughter. Her dad doesn’t want her around anymore now that he has a new baby. Her friends are maturing faster than her, which can be summed up by one of my favorite quotes from the book-

“Macie hung up. Abandoned her again for some asshole that couldn’t find a girl his own age, so he had to go sniffing around for someone easier to dazzle with his mediocrity.”

For Lila’s mother Caroline, these new disappearances bring up the horrifying past she fled New Orleans to suppress. And now it’s happening again. Despite her efforts to keep her daughter submissive and well-behaved, Lila is rebelling, and she’s terrified that whatever happened so long ago will happen to Lila as well.

Such a pretty smile had such an amazing summary and it’s insanely quotable with delicate yet dark descriptions and dialogue, but the story just wasn’t for me. I wanted more from it. As I said, the writing is beautiful. I have tons of pages copied on my phone so I could go back and reread certain passages as I review. But the story itself was muddled and confusing to me. I kept waiting and waiting for it to get better and I was left disappointed by the end.

But maybe the dead dogs ruined it for me before I could even get into it.

⅖ stars
Special thanks to Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read this one.

This book was enjoyable but it was also some sort of metaphor for the patriarchy keeping down all the feminine emotions and just being a “good girl.” A supernatural thriller being told from Caroline’s POV in 2004 and her daughter, Lila, in 2019. Basically, Caroline is an amazing artist who disappeared for 5 days when she was 11. She has repressed this memory and it starts to effect her as a form of psychotic schizophrenia. However, Caroline isn’t crazy. Apparently, she had been abducted to reform her “bad” behavior and it seems to have worked since she wasn’t murdered like all the other girls that had disappeared around the same time she did. Lila is starting to go through the same things. It all comes to its very dramatic conclusion at Jazzland, NOLA’s old, abandoned amusement park.
I don’t think I was expecting a supernatural thriller. More like just a thriller since there seems to be a serial killer involved. However, give it a read. It’s fairly clear that there is a lot of mansplaining and pacifying of the women in the novel but it was definitely an interesting take on what’s going on in society.

*Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an e-arc of this novel.*

This was such an interesting read! It was a mix of a psychological thriller along with some fantastical elements which I wasn’t expecting. I couldn’t wait to see if elements were real or all in the mind.

Caroline is an artist and she becomes more anxious than usual about her daughter Lila when children start disappearing. Caroline remembers the rumoured serial killer, The Cur, from when she was young and all of the details of the recent disappearances seem to match up.

I loved the dual timeline of telling pieces of the story from when Caroline was younger and current day.

Thank you to @netgalley, the author and @stmartinspress for the eARC copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

This book publishes Tuesday! (Jan 18)

So uhhhhh this book was different. Dark. I just finished and I'm not quite sure what to say....

Let me start by saying I was intrigued and engaged the entire time. I read huge chunks at a time and begrudgingly put it down each time when I had to do something else. When I read the synopsis of the book, I expected it to be some sort of "serial killer survival's club" psychological thriller. It was not, I was wrong. And that's on me. After going through and seeing that it's marketed as horror, a genre I do not read a ton of, that makes a lot more sense. This book is not for the faint of heart. When I say it's dark and twisted, it's DARK and TWISTED.

The story is centered around a mother/daughter duo, each getting their own POV chapters. The mother, Caroline, mostly being in 2004 New Orleans and her daughter, Lila, "present-day" 2019. Without giving too much away, this book definitely has elements of an anti-patriarchal system. The entire premise is women being punished for going against the status quo, going against the submissive inferior sex they're expected to be. About keeping them in line. There is a lot of gaslighting and patronizing from the men within this book. And a LOAD of triggers in this book. So please read up on those before diving into it.

Nevertheless, this book deserves its props. I could not put it down and can easily seeing myself reading more by this author.

PS while there's absolutely no comparison between the descriptions within the book, I kept imagining the Beasts from the 2004 movie, "The Village". Every time, that's all I saw.

"No one ever imagined the pretty girl doing anything wrong,"

This book had me hooked from the first chapter! This book is such a genius social commentary on gender roles and appropriate behavior for women and girls in juxtaposition with how in your face and unapologetic this story is. Caroline tried so hard to never make a mistake, even as far as making sure she never walks ahead of a man. When we find out the truth behind the horror that unfolds throughout this book and the lore and history of it all it leads to only more questions, but not in a way that leaves you wanting more. In a way that the story is so complete is keeps you thinking about it for days. The mother-daughter relationship is an incredibly intricate and important part of this story, especially when you can see that Caroline absolutely LIVES for her daughter.

This book is shocking, and brutal, and smart, and a perfect commentary for the way the world still is no matter how much it changes.

"She raised her daughter to be good, to obey the rules, because obedience meant safety."

<<Please check out my full review and interview with Kristi DeMeester on my podcast 1/18 episode of What Angela Reads available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.>>

This. You must read this. I have a thing for dark and twisty books so this was a must read for me and for you too. It will draw you right in. I still can't get it out of my head. Excited to see what else this author is going to come up with next. Happy reading!

Such a Pretty Smile is a psychological thriller/horror set across multiple timelines and pov’s. It follows a mother and daughter and their struggles with obsession, hallucinations, and mental health all while conjuring a thematic thread of female empowerment. At the outset, we are led to believe there is a serial killer on the loose specifically after young girls. Then we discover a series of parasitic things or beasts are taking over the minds of these young women. Girls who are “bad” and need to be taught “lessons.” The beginning of this novel had such potential with interesting and artistic characters and plot potentials. Unfortunately, towards the middle it took a shift for me. I am actually pretty disappointed and it left me feeling kinda uncomfortable and confused. Not in the good way.

There’s something out there that’s killing teenage girls, who are known as trouble-makers; those who refuse to conform, to know their place. Girls who don’t know when to shut up. It is known as The Cur, and he leaves no traces, except for the torn bodies of his victims. In 2004, Caroline Sawyer hears dogs everywhere. Snarling, barking, teeth snapping that no one else seems to notice. 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. In 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. As past demons become a present threat, both Caroline and Lila must chase the source of this unrelenting, oppressive power to its malignant core. This book 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.

Told in a dual-timeline, this book is a powerful, jaw-dropping, creepy, sinister, unnerving horror story. If you are a fan of a good horror story, then you will love this!

I always look with some skepticism towards books that are released in January, especially those by relatively unknown writers. Such a book could either mean one of two things. First, it could mean that the publisher has absolutely no confidence in the title. After all, January is the season when people’s credit card bills are still maxed out from Christmas, and they’re otherwise not spending as much money regardless. But it could mean something else: the publisher does have confidence in the book, but they’re releasing it into a field where there’s not as much big-name competition to give it more of a fighting chance. To this end, Kristi DeMeester — whose previous publishing credits appear to have been with smaller or at least independent presses — is getting a bit of a gamble from her big-name publisher for this one. Such a Pretty Smile’s first publication run is 100,000 copies, which is a staggering amount when I’ve seen other thrillers from St. Martin’s Press get announced first print runs of just 50,000 to 75,000 copies. So there appears to be saleability here, but is the book any good? Well, the answer’s a little bit complicated and is both yes and no.

The plot for Such a Pretty Smile is very convoluted, and it’s tough to describe it without revealing secrets that get unveiled later on in the book — so I’m trying my best to be careful here as much as I might be being vague. The novel concerns two story arcs: the first is told from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl named Lila who lives in Atlanta in the year 2019 — one year before COVID-19 really took hold. The other story arc concerns her mother, Caroline, who appears to be in her 20s and is set in New Orleans in 2004 — one year before Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. In both arcs, there appears to be a serial killer on the loose called the Cur who is targeting young girls. The said killer is more of a beast because it mutilates the bodies of the victims beyond recognition and some of the mutilations are sexual in nature. Meanwhile, both Lila and Carolina in each story arc are going through certain changes — with a deep, dark longing feeding in their bodies— and are having terrible visions, either visual or auditory in nature. Could these females actually be the serial killer in disguise, or is there something terrible linking them to a much more horrible, external source?

In a way, Such a Pretty Smile has a passing familiarity with Stephen King’s Carrie, except telekinesis isn’t involved in the former. In both books, a young woman is dealing with psychological distress while being under the thumb of an overbearing mother. Both books, in their own ways, too, are feminist in nature. In the case of Such a Pretty Smile, the book is really about the silencing of women’s voices in both politics and sexuality. This novel argues that women are expected to be nice, complacent, and docile — sort of along the lines of the rule about children being seen and not heard. When women do display anger or another emotion that might not be quite so favourable, especially in the eyes of men, they’re then written off as crazy and delusional. As such, mental illness plays a huge role in the book — if that’s not giving very much away — and psychiatrists, who (let’s face it) are usually male, get something of a bad rap here. Thus, Such a Pretty Smile has some important things to say and is darkly atmospheric to boot for a horror / psychological suspense novel. The message of the book is crucially important, and it may challenge the way you think — especially if you’re male.

However, Such a Pretty Smile has another characteristic of Stephen King’s writing: there’s a fair amount of bloat. While DeMeester does an admirable job of getting inside of her character’s heads, there are moments in the novel when not much happens when the Cur or whatever is behind these grisly murders is out on a coffee break. The story can get dry at times, especially in its middle third. There are also moments of sloppy writing, of incredibility. For instance, at one point, one character wants to phone a retired police detective. The character finds this individual by looking in the white pages of a phone book. Now, maybe things work differently in the States (I’m from Canada), but one thing journalism school teaches you is that you’re not going to find the home phone number of a cop, probably even one of a retired one, as those numbers tend to be unlisted — for good reasons. Thus, there are times when DeMeester falls into using particularly lazy and under-researched shortcuts to get the plot moving, no matter how unrealistic or improbable they might be.

Basically, Such a Pretty Smile is certainly worth reading and is worthy of a book being published in the cold, bleak days of January. It just has some very novice writing lapses from time to time. I can say that the plot is certainly fresh and original, even though it’s hard to explain what’s really going on with this book without giving the entire thing away. It is, as a result, darkly creepy and certainly puts some new twists on genre fiction, in addition to also making you think about how women are treated by society. Therefore, there are things to recommend about the novel. However, it does feel a tad far-fetched at times, and there are instances of stilted dialogue — doctors have a habit of talking to people using textbook dialogue, for example. So, there’s a roughly even mixture of both good and bad with this book. Still, Such a Pretty Smile exceeded my expectations of a read of this type. I can certainly see why the publisher has so much faith in this one. DeMeester has written a truly intriguing and mostly satisfying book, one that should be still selling briskly when February finally rolls around.

Feminism Horror and Powerful

I am not big into horror but I was interested in reading Such A Pretty Smile. It took me a while to read this as DeMeester's book is hugely violent, visceral and gorey. All the characters are powerful, and I felt myself drawn to them.

Such A Pretty Smile draws you in with the concept of feminism horror, and deals with very sensitive topics such as grief, sexism, and societal norms. This book takes you on a wild ride.

If you are sensitive to the trigger warnings that come with this book, or are a dog lover, DO NOT READ THIS.
However, I would highly recommend Kristi's book to any horror fan.

Thank you to NetGalley, Kristi DeMeester and St. Martin's Press for the chance to review an ARC copy.