Saturday, August 25, 2007

REVIEW: Pretty Little Mistakes, by Heather McElhatton

Released: May 2007. Click on the cover to buy.

Remember Choose Your Own Adventure from when you were a kid? These were the books that gave you choices at the end of each section that let you decide where the story was going to go next. The books were all written in the second person ("you come to a castle..." etc.) and you would have to choose the next step- do you go into the castle or not? Run away or stay and fight? And so on. Pretty Little Mistakes is like a Choose Your Own Adventure for adults only the "you" of the story is an adolescent young woman and the adventure takes the reader from late high school through the end of her life. At the beginning you decide whether to go to college or travel after high school. It goes on from there and there are many, many possible outcomes. One version of events might lead you to be the owner of a bed and breakfast in Tuscany; in another version, you die in a random fast food shooting at the age of 18. Sometimes the character's life took me all of ten minutes to read through before some untimely death; other times I spent up to an hour.

So it's not the kind of book you read straight through- with all the twists and turns it wouldn't make any sense. It's a fun little (big) book to flip through and browse. It's well-written enough, not literary by any stretch but sort of like melodramatic chick lit- no literary pretensions either. I like the concept of an adult version of "choose your own adventure" though I did find some of the twists a little contrived. Cute though, and a fun light read. A great book for the beach or the hammock.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I used to love that type of book! coolness.