Book Review

Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica

Mary Kubica is kind of my everything right now. I love psychological thrillers, and when you pair them with fascinating female characters, I’m jumping up and down for joy.

Pretty Baby is Kubica’s second book, and her sophomore novel is even better than its predecessor, The Good Girl ( A | BN | K | G | AB ). That’s saying a lot because I loved The Good Girl like whoa.

Chicagoan Heidi Wood is a compulsive do-gooder. She works at a non-profit, she rescues feral cats, she gives money to the homeless people she passes on the way to work. So when she sees a young girl, filthy and half-starved and clutching an infant at a L station, she feels compelled to help. Heidi runs into the girl and her baby multiple times and, terrified for the feverish infant, invites them into her home.

Heidi’s husband, Chris, and her moody adolescent daughter think she’s insane for bringing these two children home. The girl, Willow, tells Heidi she’s 18 (she’s clearly younger) and that the baby is hers. The story doesn’t add up though, and when Heidi washes Willow’s filthy clothes she finds her undershirt is soaked in blood.

The reader feels the wrongness of the situation–how did Willow get the baby? What is she running from?  Will Heidi’s good intentions come back to bite her? Adding to the pyschological suspense is Heidi’s obsession with the infant, Ruby. Heidi had always wanted a huge family, but cervical cancer tore that dream from her. Worse yet she was diagnosed with the aggressive cancer when she was only a few weeks into her second pregnancy, and she’s haunted by her decision to abort the pregnancy and get a hysterectomy. Even as I was worried about Willow’s past–was she a murderer? Did she abduct baby Ruby?–Heidi’s obsession with the  baby her reflections on her own loss made me uneasy:

I find myself thinking about the baby, about Ruby, all the time, when I’m not thinking about the blood. Holding Ruby and listening to her wail, it reminds me of all the imaginary children I once longed to have. The ones I was supposed to have. I find myself dreaming night after night about babies: living babies, dead babies, cherubic babies, cherubs with their angelic wings. I dream of Juliet [the pregnancy she aborted]. I dream of embryos and fetuses, and baby bottles and baby shoes. I dream of giving birth to babies all night long, and I dream of blood, blood on the undershirt, blood oozing from between my legs, red and thick, coagulating inside my panties. Panties that were once a brilliant white, like the undershirt.

I wake in a panic, sweating, while Chris and Zoe never stir.

Kubica’s signature is a split, non-linear narrative, and I love it. Some of the story is told from Heidi’s perspective and some from Chris’s and tells the story of Heidi meeting Willow and bringing her home. Then we get Willow’s story, told after the crisis point of the narrative, almost like an epilogue interspersed throughout the book.

Kubica plays in negative space–she never reveals the crux of the mystery, the black moment, the big reveal–all while sketching out the events that come before and after it. With Heidi and Chris, we live the story real time. With Willow we know something happened, but not what, and glean clues from her narrative, too. It’s a remarkably tricky thing to pull off and Kubica does it brilliantly.

Heidi and Willow’s narratives are muddled, a story that’s layered and riddled with guilt and loss and regret. They are unreliable narrators and as a reader I remained suspicious of the story they told. Chris’s narrative is less tricky, less clouded by pain, and it’s through his eyes that we see things unraveling. Kubica makes each voice unique and her skill as a writer is evident as I jumped around the story, never getting lost.

The other thing I love about Kubica is she subverts the “female as victim” mystery trope. Willow, despite her youth, despite her situation, despite the fact that she has been victimized, is a character who maintains her agency. We are never sure if she’s a hero or a villain or something more complex in-between

I do feel compelled to warn readers that this book deals with child abuse, sometimes graphically, and if that’s a trigger for you, you may want to steer clear.

I love a thriller that makes me think, makes me question the narrator and isn’t  just about who buried the body in the woods. Pretty Baby is all those things, and combined with exquisite writing and an ending that comes together beautifully it was an A read for me.

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Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica

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  1. Jamie says:

    So while I like mysteries, I do generally like to know what happened, even if it’s in real time. Does Kubica ever explain how Willow got the baby and what happened to them? I’m all for multiple pov and mystery, but if the author doesn’t show me what’s really going on, I get annoyed and won’t read them again.

  2. Elyse says:

    @Jamie Yes you do find out what happened

  3. Julia says:

    When I read “The Good Girl” I was really disturbed by the anti-abortion screed toward the end of the book. It ruined the whole book for me. I was wondering if this one with the emphasis on the heroine’s abortion is the same.

  4. Charlotte Russell says:

    Well I’m hooked but dagnabbit if it isn’t out til the end of the month Hopefully I will remember it then.

  5. Bambi says:

    Reading this review reminds me of stuff by Margaret Atwood. Have you ever read her novels? I feel like you’d like them.

  6. Kay says:

    No, you do not know what happens to Chris and Heidis relationship. You don’t know if Heidi recovers from PTSD or the delusions. While it’s true that all other characters and situations are answered, the main ones…Chris aNd heidis future is absolutely not answered.

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