The Aussie Zombie

Imagine disappearing from your life for three years and when you come back, you don't remember even being gone, let alone where you were. Angie finds herself in exactly this situation after she is kidnapped whilst on a camping trip and the next thing she remembers, she's standing in front of her house three years later.

Angie's homecoming is emotional and awkward - her parents and friends have moved on and she doesn't feel comfortable in her own skin, and everything is made even more difficult by the fact that although everyone wants to know where and who she has been with, Angie cannot remember.

It's not hard to feel a huge sympathy towards Angie - she's a completely lost soul who doesn't fit into her life anymore and feels like she was only missing for a matter of hours, not years. But as well as being lost, throughout the story she is also incredibly brave and wants to move on with her life and be a normal teenager, which makes it really easy to like her. However, I found her family to be quite inconsistent - her mother swerves between involved and understandably over-protective to seemingly completely unconnected, and there are several family-related plot lines that didn't feel resolved.

The plot is dark and creepy, and a real page turner as Angie discovers more and more about exactly what happened to her during those three lost years, and I really liked where Ms. Coley steered the story - there's no sugar-coating events and everything that Angie experiences is written with a great deal of care and consideration. However, I did find the writing style to be a little clunky and uncomfortable until I was almost half-way through the book - it felt like there were far too many ''Angie said'' and ''Angie did'''s for the story to flow smoothly.

Pretty Girl-13 wasn't an easy read, and there were several moments that took me by surprise, but overall it was an intriguing and creepy read. It's a good mystery and quite shocking in places, but the inconsistency of Angie's parents, unresolved plot lines and the awkward writing didn't always sit well with me.

Read more of my reviews at The Aussie Zombie