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A review by rachelrreads
Pretty Things by Janelle Brown
3.0
Tl;dr: Janelle Brown has come up with an intriguing concept for this novel, but Pretty Things needs some judicious cuts! The story's ideas and character development do not necessitate its extreme length, and the book is incredibly long-winded.
This book was such an interesting idea, but it is painfully long-winded. The book opens with protagonist and con artist Nina Ross in the middle of her latest scheme: She's at a nightclub charming her latest victim, who's an arrogant rich kid Instagram influencer. Nina drugs the man, then takes him home to quickly take inventory of his valuables. It's a thrilling set-up, and Janelle Brown opens the novel right in the middle of the action. It turns out that Nina has turned to this life in order to pay for her mother's cancer treatments and that she learned her grifter ways from her mother herself. Accordingly, I thought the rest of Pretty Things would move along at a similarly brisk, enthralling pace. But this book is almost 500 pages long, and while I don't shy away from long books, it does not earn this page count!
Nina soon sets her sights on a much larger, complicated mark: Heiress and Instagram influencer Vanessa Liebling. It turns out that Nina has a specific connection to the Liebling family and therefore reasons for targeting Vanessa.
The book alternates between first-person narration from Nina and Vanessa. In doing so, it luxuriates in hundreds of pages of backstory for both characters that could easily be condensed. I think a good 200 or so pages could have been excised from the middle of the book, and my understanding of the story still would have been complete. It then inexplicably races to the finish. And Pretty Things does have some juicy, unexpected twists at the end, but those twists do not make up for the book's sagging, drawn-out middle.
This book was such an interesting idea, but it is painfully long-winded. The book opens with protagonist and con artist Nina Ross in the middle of her latest scheme: She's at a nightclub charming her latest victim, who's an arrogant rich kid Instagram influencer. Nina drugs the man, then takes him home to quickly take inventory of his valuables. It's a thrilling set-up, and Janelle Brown opens the novel right in the middle of the action. It turns out that Nina has turned to this life in order to pay for her mother's cancer treatments and that she learned her grifter ways from her mother herself. Accordingly, I thought the rest of Pretty Things would move along at a similarly brisk, enthralling pace. But this book is almost 500 pages long, and while I don't shy away from long books, it does not earn this page count!
Nina soon sets her sights on a much larger, complicated mark: Heiress and Instagram influencer Vanessa Liebling. It turns out that Nina has a specific connection to the Liebling family and therefore reasons for targeting Vanessa.
The book alternates between first-person narration from Nina and Vanessa. In doing so, it luxuriates in hundreds of pages of backstory for both characters that could easily be condensed. I think a good 200 or so pages could have been excised from the middle of the book, and my understanding of the story still would have been complete. It then inexplicably races to the finish. And Pretty Things does have some juicy, unexpected twists at the end, but those twists do not make up for the book's sagging, drawn-out middle.