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'baby' is a pretty feat of misdirection.

Bethanne Patrick

Pretty Baby

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A novelist friend once told me she loves the TV series American Crime because it focuses on "the other people affected, the ones you never hear about, when a crime happens." You might think creators of fiction, like my friend, would be the first to consider "the other people affected," but finding a suspense novel that upends both the linearity and the nature of what constitutes "crime" occurs less than I might like.

Fortunately, Mary Kubica's second novel, Pretty Baby , plays both with the timeline and with the notion of who is most harmed. Heidi Wood, a social worker, lives in downtown Chicago with her husband, Chris, and their bright but newly sullen 12-year-old daughter, Zoe. While commuting, Heidi notices a disheveled teenage girl toting a filthy, miserable baby. After seeing the pair more than once, Heidi approaches the girl — who gives her name as Willow Greer — and invites her to a local diner for a meal, ostensibly to discover whether the girl needs to go to a shelter.

We learn a lot about Heidi, Chris and Zoe in the first half of Pretty Baby , especially after Heidi invites Willow and baby Ruby to move in to their apartment. Chris travels a lot on business, but although a colleague is eager to get him into bed, he adores his wife and daughter — even when the latter tests her parents' nerves by shutting her mother and father out of her thoughts and room.

It's the perfect setup: Willow, seedy, suspicious and even scary (is that blood on her undershirt?), is going to worm her way into this family and destroy them. Will she steal all their valuables? Have an affair with Chris, who struggles to reconnect with Heidi after a serious health scare? Ruin Zoe's life and reputation? Heidi is so preoccupied with getting the sick baby well (it takes awhile for a doctor to diagnose a urinary tract infection, brought on by Ruby's dirty diaper) that she fails to consider most of the possible complications.

Kubica patiently constructs a tableau offering glimpses of Willow's before and after stories: She landed in a foster home with a dangerously abusive father figure — and, at some point, wound up in juvenile detention being questioned about murders (yes, plural). When and where did Willow give birth to Ruby? Who is Ruby's father? What does Willow want from the Wood family? When and how did she get taken to detention?

Most readers will get caught up in these questions as they watch Heidi try to take over all responsibility for Ruby's care. And when Chris engages a private detective to find out more about Willow, the story teeters on the edge of a climax in which one family's kindness is repaid with evil.

But Kubica has delicately misdirected our attention. I normally dislike endings that unspool quickly, seeing them as the result of fatigue or even laziness on the author's part, yet for Pretty Baby , the stage has been set while we were looking up toward the balcony. The fast-paced final chapters show us how easily we all ignore hidden infections in favor of surface wounds, and why "the ones you never hear about" may carry the deepest secrets.

Bethanne Patrick is a freelance writer and critic who tweets @TheBookMaven .

C.H. Armstrong Books

Official Website of Author & Literary Agent, Cathie Hedrick-Armstrong

Book Review: “Pretty Baby” by Mary Kubica

RATING GUIDE ★ Hated it ★★ Really Didn’t Like it Much at All ★★★ Liked It ★★★★ Really Enjoyed it ★★★★★ LOVED It

Several months ago, I read Mary Kubica’s debut novel, The Good Girl .  I remember gasping at the opening paragraphs, caught by the throat by her writing and needing to know more about the main characters right away.  At the time I placed it near the top of my list as one of the Top Five Books I’ve read in 2015. Today, Ms. Kubica has a fierce challenger — herself!

Late last night, I finally finished Kubica’s latest novel, Pretty Baby .  With so much going on in my life at the moment, it took me weeks to finish it (which is very unusual) but, unlike most novels that sometimes go unfinished when I don’t have the time for them, I couldn’t get Kubica’s characters out of my head.  Even if I only had fifteen minutes to read, I went back to the characters in the book.  I hated that I didn’t have the time to devour it all in one sitting!  When I was done reading, I only had one thought:  WOW!  WOW!  WOW!  It was that good!

What can I tell you about Pretty Baby that won’t ruin the suspense and surprise ending for you?  This is hard!

The setting is Chicago, near the L platform.  A middle-aged woman sees a young girl and her baby waiting in the terminal.  They’re clearly homeless, and the woman can’t get the girl and her baby out of her head.  But she goes on, assuming she’ll never see them again.  As fate would have it, however, their paths cross on a couple more occasions and the woman is determined to help the young woman.  She just can’t leave her on the streets with an infant child, so she does the unthinkable — the one thing so many of us wish we could do, but don’t because we don’t know what we’re dealing with.  She takes the two home with her where she shelters and feeds them, overriding her husband’s and daughter’s vehement objections.

So begins a story with a dozen twists and turns — coupled with secrets, lies and misunderstandings — that will keep you on your toes until the very last page!  This is not a novel with secrets that are easily discovered!  You might think you know what’s going to happen, but you’ll still be guessing until Kubica slowly unravels the truth, piece by piece.

One of the elements I loved best about Pretty Baby — and The Good Girl before it — is that you’re never quite certain who “the good guy” is.  You think you know who it is, then the author casts suspicion elsewhere — and then you’re sure you know who it is, then more suspicion is cast in yet another direction.  Finally you just decide to quit guessing and just go with the flow.

If it’s not already, Pretty Baby is destined to be a best-seller.  It’s that good!  I can’t remember a time when I’ve been so enthralled with a story, anxious to discover the truth hidden within the characters.

Pretty Baby will appeal to those who enjoyed Kubica’s first novel, but also to those who couldn’t get enough of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.   Actually, she reminds me of what I loved most about those early novels by Mary Higgins Clark, minus the creepy stalkers and serial killers.  The suspense is similar.

For more information, check out the author’s website using THIS BUTTON .  If you’re interested in purchasing a copy of this book, I’ve made it easy for you!  Simply use one of the buttons below to purchase through Amazon,Barnes & Noble, or iBooks online.  Enjoy!

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5 responses to “Book Review: “Pretty Baby” by Mary Kubica”

Reblogged this on Friends of the Rochester Public Library .

I’ve heard a lot about this book.

Like Liked by 1 person

For good reason. It’s truly spectacular!

I love your book reviews Cathie!!! Keep them coming.

Thanks, Sue! I think you’ll really love this book!

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PRETTY BABY

by Mary Kubica ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015

This book will give insomniacs a compelling reason to sit up all night.

Things go dangerously wrong when a middle-class wife and mother impulsively opens her home to a homeless teen and her tiny baby in Kubica’s sophomore novel.

When Heidi Wood, a woman who can’t help herself from helping others, spots a teenage girl with a small baby on the platform of Chicago’s train system, her heart goes out to them. Not only is it cold and raining, but the pair is obviously in need of help. Soon, Heidi has spotted the homeless teenager again, and, being the nurturing type, she feels compelled to reach out to her. That annoys her husband, Chris, and selfish 12-year-old daughter, Zoe. But Heidi ignores her husband’s misgivings—after all, he’s distracted by the new girl at work, Cassidy Knudsen, a lissome blonde who always seems to be nearby when Heidi calls. So when she brings the girl, Willow, and Ruby, her baby, into their condo, it only widens the gap between Heidi and Chris. And, through some clever foreshadowing, the reader knows, almost from the outset, that this isn’t going to turn out so well for the Wood family. Kubica skillfully weaves the story together, with Chris, Heidi, and Willow all narrating portions of the tale. As bits and pieces of Willow’s story are revealed, the other characters keep the story moving forward toward what the reader knows will be disastrous results. Kubica's debut novel, The Good Girl (2014), also employed multiple points of view and timelines, but Kubica serves up a much more cohesive tale this time around—the story is almost hypnotic and anything but predictable. The writing is compelling, but Kubica’s strong point is being able to juggle a complicated plot and holding the reader’s interest without dropping any of the balls she has in the air.

Pub Date: July 28, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-7783-1770-8

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Harlequin MIRA

Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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More by Mary Kubica

BOOK REVIEW

by Mary Kubica

More About This Book

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

More by Max Brooks

by Max Brooks

BOOK TO SCREEN

IndieBound Bestseller

THE SILENT PATIENT

by Alex Michaelides ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2019

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.

"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

More by Alex Michaelides

by Alex Michaelides

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Book Review

Pretty baby by mary kubica.

by Elyse · Jul 9, 2015 at 4:00 am · View all 6 comments

Pretty Baby

by Mary Kubica

July 28, 2015 · Harlequin MIRA

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Genre: Mystery/Thriller

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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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.

@Jamie Yes you do find out what happened

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.

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

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

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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Pretty Baby

A chance encounter sparks an unrelenting web of lies in this stunning new psychological thriller from New York Times bestselling author Mary Kubica.

She sees the teenage girl on the train platform, standing in the pouring rain, clutching an infant in her arms. She boards a train and is whisked away. But she can’t get the girl out of her head…

Heidi Wood has always been a charitable woman: she works for a nonprofit, takes in stray cats. Still, her husband and daughter are horrified when Heidi returns home one day with a young woman named Willow and her four-month-old baby in tow. Disheveled and apparently homeless, this girl could be a criminal—or worse. But despite her family’s objections, Heidi invites Willow and the baby to take refuge in their home.

Heidi spends the next few days helping Willow get back on her feet, but as clues into Willow’s past begin to surface, Heidi is forced to decide how far she’s willing to go to help a stranger. What starts as an act of kindness quickly spirals into a story far more twisted than anyone could have anticipated…

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“This book will give insomniacs a compelling reason to sit up all night.” ~ Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A superb psychological thriller.” ~ Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Intricately wrought suspense…. This is no familiar game of psychopaths; everyone is deeply flawed but deeply human.” ~ Vulture

“Thrilling and illuminating…(PRETTY BABY) raises the ante on the genre.” ~ L.A. Times

“A hypnotic psychological thriller.  [Pretty Baby] builds to a stunning climax involving revelations you won’t see coming.” ~ People Magazine

“It’s a perfect setup-but the twists you expect aren’t the ones that arrive.” ~ NPR

“Kubica is back with another psychological thriller that begs you to turn the page.” ~ InStyle

“Suspense done well.” ~ New York Magazine

“I was captivated by Mary Kubica’s newest novel “Pretty Baby”. With each chapter, new layers are uncovered and new secrets are revealed, keeping the reader guessing until the end.  Don’t miss this complex page turner!” ~ Maxwell Gregory, Lake Forest Book Store

“From the author of The Good Girl comes another thriller that will keep you from getting things done around the house. Heidi and Chris are a well to do couple raising their daughter Zoe in Chicago.  Their normal domesticity takes a turn when Heidi invites a homeless girl and her infant daughter to live with them. The story is told from varying points of view, Heidi, Chris, and Willow, who doesn’t want to talk about the father of the baby, or the bloodstains on her t-shirt. I greatly enjoyed this smart and modern novel, and I look forward to seeing more from Mary Kubica.” ~ Sharon K. Nagel, Boswell Book Company

INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS

Review: In ‘Pretty Baby,’ an act of kindness spirals into dangerous territory

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What do you do when you encounter a homeless person? Most people have one of two responses: either avert their eyes and move away, or give the person a dollar, sometimes more, hoping to alleviate their suffering but knowing a few dollars here and there probably won’t. Heidi Wood, the kindhearted protagonist of Mary Kubica’s “Pretty Baby,” does something more direct, and with far-reaching repercussions.

It’s April in Chicago, and the Windy City is experiencing record rainfalls. On Heidi’s walk to the elevated train platform, she consistently sees a teenage girl dressed in torn jeans and an army green nylon coat, barely managing her vintage suitcase and a writhing, distraught infant. Heidi lingers, “wanting to do something, but not wanting to seem intrusive or offensive. There’s a fine line between helpful and disrespectful, one which I don’t want to cross.” While Heidi’s job at a nonprofit literacy agency has sensitized her to the faces behind the poverty statistics, her husband, Chris, an investment banker whose affection for Heidi has become “more a force of habit than something sweet,” considers her a bleeding heart and cringes at the words “immigrant” and “refugee,” convinced she cares more for the plight of the have-nots than her own husband.

Through the early chapters written from Heidi and Chris’ points of view, one senses a pall has settled over the Wood family that leaves 12-year-old daughter Zoe sullen and makes Heidi imagine she’s seeing her dead father in the commuting crowds. Meanwhile, Chris doubles down on his work, driven by his deeply ingrained need for “money, money, money,” and tries to avoid the temptation presented by business trips with Cassidy Knudsen, a lithe, young co-worker whose interest in Chris’ spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations is fraught with sexual tension.

When Heidi hears that baby’s wail near the el station again, “the sound grabs me by the throat,” and before you can say “bad idea,” she has invited the teenager, Willow Greer, and baby Ruby to join her for dinner at a nearby diner.

Kubica (whose first novel, the well-received “Good Girl,” also uses multiple points of view and time frames) ratchets up the suspense here by introducing Willow’s point of view, beginning with a hostile interview with a social worker some days after that fateful dinner. But instead of the torn jeans and thin coat, Willow’s wearing an orange jumpsuit, leaving readers to wonder what happened to bring her to this distressing turn of events. The answers seem to come at an agonizingly slow pace, but in actuality are the mark of Kubica’s skill at plotting and character development, which belie that “Pretty Baby” is only her second novel.

At the diner, Heidi reflects on how a decade before, she and Chris had aborted a fetus early in the first trimester when Heidi underwent a hysterectomy to combat cervical cancer. The pain of that loss lingers — one of many revelations that Kubica masterfully juggles as Heidi ushers Willow and Ruby into her home, an act that disgusts and alarms her husband and daughter and sets in motion a bigger set of problems for them all.

Willow brings to the Woods’ home baggage beyond the vintage suitcase she clings to as tightly as baby Ruby. Without revealing too much, Willow’s back story illuminates the consequences of a foster care system more concerned with achieving metrics and quotas than doing the right thing by the children it purports to serve. After so much neglect and abuse, Willow recognizes in Heidi the first person to be kind to her in years. But are Willow’s feelings simply gratitude, and Heidi’s mere kindness, or is something more complex at play between them?

Foster care, homelessness, the limits of altruism, the little lies and betrayals of midlife marriage, the consequence of unexamined grief all unspool over several intense days as Heidi becomes more absorbed by Willow and Ruby, and Chris and Zoe seek solace away from home. Yet, as the suspense mounts, Kubica never resorts to stereotypes or easy fixes for people who are battered and broken by circumstances beyond their control, symbolized by a wedding photo Chris has thumbtacked to a bulletin board after the frame broke: “Our protective glass frame shattered and now here we were, punctured with microscopic holes that might one day tear. Those holes all had names: mortgage, adolescent child, lack of communication, retirement savings, cancer.”

It is rare that a novel of what has come to be called domestic suspense is thrilling and illuminating, but “Pretty Baby” manages to be both without overtly showing the hard work that has gone into striking the right balance. In doing so, it raises the ante on the genre and announces the welcome second coming of a talent well worth watching.

Woods is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, has written four mysteries and has edited several anthologies. :: Pretty Baby

Mary Kubica Mira/Harlequin: 371 pages; $24.95

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Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica: A Book Review

When it comes to favorite genres, I tend to have a pretty expansive range. However, suspense and thriller is where it all started for me. A couple years ago, a coworker of mine recommended Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica . Like me, mystery and suspense novels were her favorite and after reading the synopsis I was intrigued.

Then when Heidi encounters the girl and the baby a day later, she offers the girl food and a warm place to stay. Of course, she does this without first consulting her husband or her teenage daughter.

From the moment Willow and the infant Ruby enter their home, their pasts are a mystery. But as the clues gradually surface, what comes to light is a story so shocking that none of them could’ve ever anticipated it.

I’ve never heard of Mary Kubica before so this was my first time reading one of her novels. Her writing is very tiresome so it took me quite a while to really get into the book. But once I finally got hooked, which was about halfway into it, the pace quickened and I could read it a lot faster.

I didn’t like Heidi from the get go. Something about her character seemed very weak and pathetic to me. And, as it turns out, there was a reason why as we witness her mental health unravel. Of course I have to stop right there before I reveal too much.

Throughout her perspective I couldn’t help but sense a thick layer of pro-life propaganda settling on her character, the same way grease eventually settles on the surrounding area of a kitchen stove. But maybe it’s just the timing of when I was reading the book since there were a lot of politically-charged events going on in the news at the time.

Willow, on the other hand, seemed different. From Heidi’s point of view, she was a mystery. She was a threat. But when the story switched to Willow’s perspective, she seemed more like a lost soul.

Pretty Baby is a suspense novel told from different perspectives. The author does use interesting reverse storytelling mechanics to build suspense, but for me it wasn’t enough to overcome the writing.

This book was purchased by me with my own money for personal enjoyment. Opinions are that of my own and not influenced by the publisher or any marketing agency.

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Pretty Baby

Mary Kubica | 3.92 | 45,539 ratings and reviews

Ranked #84 in Psychological Thriller

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Book Review: Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica

A chance encounter sparks an unrelenting web of lies in this stunning new psychological thriller from the national bestselling author of The Good Girl, Mary Kubica   She sees the teenage girl on the train platform, standing in the pouring rain, clutching an infant in her arms. She boards a train and is whisked away. But she can't get the girl out of her head…  Heidi Wood has always been a charitable woman: she works for a nonprofit, takes in stray cats. Still, her husband and daughter are horrified when Heidi returns home one day with a young woman named Willow and her four-month-old baby in tow. Disheveled and apparently homeless, this girl could be a criminal—or worse. But despite her family's objections, Heidi invites Willow and the baby to take refuge in their home.  Heidi spends the next few days helping Willow get back on her feet, but as clues into Willow's past begin to surface, Heidi is forced to decide how far she's willing to go to help a stranger. What starts as an act of kindness quickly spirals into a story far more twisted than anyone could have anticipated. Don't miss this thrilling follow-up to The Good Girl by master of suspense, Mary Kubica.

In Pretty Baby , Mary Kubica’s ( The Good Girl) sophomore novel, a Chicago humanitarian is moved to bring home a homeless teen and her baby, much to her husband and daughter’s chagrin. Who is this girl and what is she running from?

I really enjoyed last summer’s The Good Girl and so have been eagerly anticipating Kubica’s newest thriller. In Pretty Baby , we get pieces of the story from three characters. Heidi works for a nonprofit and has a heart of gold. Heidi’s husband Chris is a workaholic with an attractive, flirty coworker. And Willow is the mysterious homeless mother of baby Ruby.

Heidi is consumed with Willow and the baby and wants to help them get back on their feet. Chris is used to his wife wanting to save the world but bringing in a family is different than rescuing a kitten. He meanwhile fears for his family’s safety and keeps them all locked safely in their bedroom. Tween daughter Zoe is annoyed by this new girl and that her mother is slacking off on family responsibilities.

Like in The Good Girl , Kubica plays with a nonlinear narrative structure, heightening the level of suspense. Willow’s troubled backstory comes in small doses, interspersed with the present day goings on. We know that this story does not end well and part of the mystery is finding out how we get there.

Kubica deftly manages a few different story threads- casting doubt on every character’s intentions. Everyone has moments of acting a bit off and we have some unreliable narrators to boot. Even still, I have to say I would never have guessed where this story ended up! This psychological thriller has strong characterization and takes you to unexpected places.

With The Good Girl , Kubica was one to watch, but now I’m totally on board with whatever she comes up with next. Kubica weaves a great page-turner here. I was going to pick up the full-cast audiobook for this one but I couldn’t wait for the release date to read it. I may give it an audio re-listen though for comparison.

Pretty Baby is on sale today. Check out the book trailer:

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4 thoughts on “ Book Review: Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica ”

I just got this – it sounds like I need to move it up my reading stack.

I hope you enjoy it too, Kathy!

I can’t wait for this one. Glad to hear it solidified your love for this author. BTW, I love the new layout. It’s great.

Thanks, Estelle! 🙂 I hope you give this book a try sometime- I’d love to know what you think.

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Book Coffee Happy

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Book Review: Pretty Baby {Mary Kubica}

Hey Everyone!

Happy Friday 🙂  I hope you all have some fun plans for this weekend.

We have 3 Hanukkah parties to attend!  Our weekend will be filled with latkes, presents, dreidels, menorahs, and lots of family and friends.  Happy 6th night of Hanukkah to all who are celebrating!  So far, my daughter’s favorite gifts have included her  hamster  and a gigantic Hatchimal (turns out I am just as excited about this toy as she is.  Do any of your kids have one???  It’s awesome!)  My son’s favorite gifts so far have included an Elmo lift the flap potty book (he received it 2 nights ago and we’ve easily read it 10 times already) and dinosaur figurines.  My husband bought me an online blogging course!  I’m so excited, hopefully I will learn all kinds of blogging tips to help Book Coffee Happy GROW!

I Am Brave and Unafraid Giveaway Winners

Congratulations to:

Debbie ( I would donate this book to the Roy School library. I have been working in this library for 13 years. The students are always very excited to see new books that I display. This book would be a great addition to our library. Thank you  😃📚 )

Becca V. ( This sounds like a wonderful book to join my classroom library. As a first grade teacher I’d love to have the opportunity to share the important message of this book. This year I’m really trying to focus on social emotional skills with my students and mentor text are a great way to start the conversation and understanding of these important topics and issues. It would also be terrific to be able to donate a copy of this book in our school library so that the whole school can have the chance to read the book. Often times the books I read in class are the ones my students like to check out so having a copy in the library would be fantastic and then my students can share it with their families.  🙂 ! )

Ladies, please email me at [email protected] and we will arrange all of the details!  Congratulations!

If you didn’t win this one, no worries…I have some AWESOME giveaways coming your way soon!  Stay tuned 🙂

And now…A book review!  I read this book years ago and LOVED it so much.

Synopsis from Goodreads:

She sees the teenage girl on the train platform, standing in the pouring rain, clutching an infant in her arms. She boards a train and is whisked away. But she can’t get the girl out of her head…

Heidi Wood has always been a charitable woman: she works for a nonprofit, takes in stray cats. Still, her husband and daughter are horrified when Heidi returns home one day with a young woman named Willow and her four-month-old baby in tow. Disheveled and apparently homeless, this girl could be a criminal—or worse. But despite her family’s objections, Heidi invites Willow and the baby to take refuge in their home.

Heidi spends the next few days helping Willow get back on her feet, but as clues into Willow’s past begin to surface, Heidi is forced to decide how far she’s willing to go to help a stranger. What starts as an act of kindness quickly spirals into a story far more twisted than anyone could have anticipated.

My Thoughts:

(Disclaimer: I will never post spoilers in my reviews HOWEVER the comment section is completely fair game to discuss any and all specifics including spoilers)

I absolutely love Mary Kubica and this book is what started it all for me.  It’s AWESOME.  Full of suspenseful twists and a great plot.  I truly couldn’t put this book down and  absolutely loved it from page 1.   Once you start reading this book you will not be able to stop until you get some answers…

The characters, the PLOT TWISTS, the story lines…everything was just awesome.  I don’t want to give too much away so I’ll just say this:  Read this.  It’s fantastic.

For my local readers, Mary Kubica is from Chicago and this is the setting for her books!  I would love these books regardless but actually knowing the places she refers to makes her books that much better for me.  I definitely do not love all of her books but overall I think she’s so amazing.  She has written more since this one but this book is by far her best!  Highly recommend.

Bottom Line:

This was the very first psychological thriller I ever read and I instantly fell in love with the entire genre based upon this one awesome book.

Have you read this book?  What did you think?

It would really help me if you could follow/subscribe to my blog.  Also, please “like” my Facebook page  ,  follow me on Twitter , and follow me on Instagram !

Click the image below to order the book through my amazon affiliate link.  when you order through this link, i receive a tiny commission. thank you for your support, xo.

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16 thoughts on “ Book Review: Pretty Baby {Mary Kubica} ”

I enjoyed this one too. Don’t You Cry is probably my favorite of her books, but her latest one is really good too! I’ve shared this review with Mary. 🙂

Thank you so much! I would love for her to see it! I tagged her here and also on Instagram, she’s amazing. Don’t You Cry was AWESOME and the ending was perfection.

I love Mary Kubica books. I haven’t read this one yet. I want to read it!

Oh you need to read this one, I think it’s her best 🙂

Have you read The Good Girl too?

On Fri, Dec 7, 2018 at 8:03 AM Book Coffee Happy wrote:

> bookcoffeehappy posted: “Hey Everyone! Happy Friday 🙂 I hope you all > have some fun plans for this weekend. We have 3 Hanukkah parties to > attend! Our weekend will be filled with latkes, presents, dreidels, > menorahs, and lots of family and friends. Happy 6th night of Hanukkah” >

Loved it!!!

Pretty Baby has been on my “to read” list for a LONG time, probably since it came out. I’m moving it up on my list now! Love your review, Jenny. Happy Hanukkah and have fun at your parties! Also, Addie has several items of clothing with dinosaurs on them and she smiles and laughs when I talk about her dinosaurs. I bet she would love E’s dinosaurs too!

Oh you NEED to read this book! I really think it’s her best one. Thank you so much for your kind words! He is currently dinosaur obsessed…all dinosaurs, all the time over here 🙂 I wish you lived closer so we could have a dino play date with them!

Ahh, a dino play date would be so fun!! She’d probably love to play with “girly” things with Em too. Addie loves purses and shoes too!

Awwww! This would be PERFECT!

OK, here are my thoughts: I started the book on Monday and once I started reading it, I had to finish it. Overall, I enjoyed the POV switch for each chapter to hear the different sides of the story. I also liked the slow progression, it helped build anxiety and a NEED to know what was going to happen. I was almost unsettled during this book, a little anxious – which in a way was a good thing because it kept me wanting to read more. I loved the plot – it had a great premise and the promise to be an amazing book. But it wasn’t and I don’t think she pulled it off. My main problem – lack of character development! I needed more from these characters to actually care about them. Seeing Heidi start to obsess over Ruby didn’t even concern me because I just didn’t care what happened to any of them. I just couldn’t connect at all. The book was also full of unnecessary information. Like details about Zoe. She was always tired and cold, running that damn heater. Was that because she was being drugged by Heidi who was “unknowingly” giving her Ambien? Also, that damn yellow notebook was so important to her and the author wrote about it as if it was an extremely important part of the story. But nothing ever happened with Zoe. She was just a typical, moody pre-teen and some of the details about her were unnecessary. And what happened to Jennifer? She needed to talk to Heidi, obsessively called and went to her house and then nothing. What was the point of that? Parts of the book were also a bit predictable, such as Ruby. Obviously, she wasn’t Willow’s daughter. After she received that letter from her sister’s adoptive family about having a new baby, I knew the baby was Calla. I just didn’t know how she got the baby so I wanted to keep reading to find out. These are just my main thoughts – I’d probably give it a 3/5 stars, and probably wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. That being said, I’m started one of her other books today – The Good Girl because I heard it was so much better than Pretty Baby. And since I enjoyed her writing style, I thought I’d try it out.

So admittingly I read the book years ago so I’m not totally remembering each detail but I I absolutely loved it! I agree with you in that I HAD TO KNOW what was going to happen, I truly couldn’t put this book down once I started. I needed answers! I remember being SHOCKED at the twist of who the baby belonged to. I really never try to predict books as I read and this twist caught me completely off guard. LOVE. I’m so sorry you didn’t love this book as much as I did! The Good Girl was an amazing book, my 2nd favorite that she has written 🙂 I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts!

I just finished Pretty Baby. It was so good. I finished in less than 3 days. I loved how the writing made you think the story was going in one direction, but then it totally turns into a different direction. I couldn’t put the book down. What an awesome read!

Yay, I’m so glad you loved it! I knew that you would!

Okay, I know this is from 5 years ago now but I just have to say that I am disappointed. I also want to say that I really like and respect your blog so I am not trying to come across as rude, just want to leave some feedback. Please try to put trigger warnings perhaps on your reviews of books? I read your review on Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell and you said that book was disturbing and you suggested this one instead. I agree that Then She Was Gone was disturbing, however, this one was three times as disturbing to me. I feel like this book was offered as a less dark alternative to the other one, but it wasn’t. This one was really hard for me to read and will stick with me.

Hi Mary! Thank you so much for your feedback and for your suggestion. I really do appreciate it and for your support of Book Coffee Happy! The reason I don’t include trigger warnings is only because I never want to give ANY spoilers and often, trigger warnings can unintentionally lead to some pretty big spoilers. Again, I so appreciate your feedback!

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Mrs B's Book Reviews

Book reviews and recommendations from a self confessed book geek, book review: pretty baby by mary kubica.

Mary Kubica’s debut novel The Good Girl , which I read last year, was a bestseller and demonstrated Kubica’s talent as a psychological thriller writer. Pretty Baby is Kubica’s second turn at the psychological thriller genre and what emerges is a polished domestic suspense novel.

When a teenage girl struggling with an infant captures the attention of the charitable Heidi Wood, it sets in motion a dramatic chain of events. Heidi Wood is a kind hearted person, willing to help anyone in any way she can.  Heidi assumes the teenage girl is homeless as she is carrying round a battered suitcase and wears the same soiled clothes. Heidi reaches out to the stranger, by offering charity in the form of her jacket for warmth, closely followed by a meal to fill the hungry girl’s empty stomach and soon after, her own home for shelter. The girl, whom reveals her name to Heidi as Willow Greer, reluctantly accepts Heidi’s help when it appears the young child she is caring for, Ruby, is running a fever. At Heidi’s home, Heidi’s husband Chris and twelve year old daughter Zoe are opposed to Willow staying at the home, not knowing if this strange girl has a violent background or a tendency to steal. While Zoe withdraws further from her mother and Chris devotes more time to his work, he also hires a private detective to investigate who Willow Greer really is. As time goes on Heidi becomes more attached to infant Ruby as Willow drip feeds Heidi painful details from her past, which is littered with loss and abuse. As Pretty Baby moves to a dramatic and pulsating ending, the characters begin to behave in unexpected and unnerving ways.

I have to say that I enjoyed Pretty Baby much more than its predecessor, The Good Girl . Despite that fact that it contains some hard to handle themes such as child abuse and grief, this was a novel that I found hard pressed to put down at night. Much of the appeal of this novel for me came from the skilful way in which Kubica structures her narrative. Alternating and dividing her viewpoints between three main characters, Heidi, her husband Chris and teen runaway Willow, gives the reader an insight into the individualised reactions to the unfolding events in the story.   Pretty Baby is one of those novels where it is difficult to discuss the finer points of the book for fear of spoiling the reading experience. However, what I will say is be prepared for all your ideas you have formed about the characters to be turned on their head by the close of the novel. The final third of Pretty Baby is ramped up to full throttle by Kubica. The ending had me stunned and stewing over the final events long after closing the back cover.

Pretty Baby is an emotionally charged book that lingers after the last page is read.  I would recommend this novel to readers who appreciate intricately designed psychological suspense novels.

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The Book Wheel

Books, Politics, & More

Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica (Book Review)

October 27, 2015 by Allison Hiltz 8 Comments

Thanks to BookBar for letting me borrow this book!

What would you do if you came across a homeless teenage girl and her infant? Would you buy them a meal? Ignore them? If you’re Heidi, you take them home with you. This is where Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica kicks off and the ripple effect of her act of charity leave no one unscathed, including Heidi’s own husband and daughter.

At 16, Willow finds herself on the streets of Chicago with an infant in tow, hoping and dreading the day that someone will help her and trying to escape a past she’d left behind. Heidi ends up being that person and, despite her husband’s protests and her daughter’s surly welcome, gives Willow and the baby a warm, safe place to live. She does everything she can to help them, despite her husband’s objections that Heidi doesn’t know this girl from a hole in the wall and makes his family sleep in the same bedroom with the door locked just in case .

If you’re thinking that you know what’s going to happen from this overarching description, I’m willing to bet you’re wrong. Pretty Baby may sound like your typical mystery but it’s far from typical in the way it unfolds and it will have you second guessing yourself every step of the way. I will say his – Willow isn’t who you think she is and Heidi is hiding just as many secrets. It’s a page turner that can be devoured in a weekend and as much as I enjoyed the story itself, I was most impressed with the style in which it was written.

The book alternates narrators, flipping back and forth between Chris, Heidi, and Willow. What’s unique about this book is that each character has a different flow – Heidi is looking forward, Chris is looking inward, and Willow is looking back. Willow’s story is especially unique in that it felt as if I was following the breadcrumbs from the forest back to the house where it all began. While alternative narrations aren’t unique, Kubica kicked them up a notch by sending each character off in a different direction before bringing them all together. It was much like watching a jellyfish swim – it expands and contracts, is always moving forward, and carries with it a glorious mystery.  

Recommended for: Mystery fans who like a a refreshing style of writing.

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• 4 Star Books

Pretty Baby

A thrilling suspense novel from the nyt bestselling author of local woman missing.

• 4.0 • 698 Ratings

Publisher Description

"Thrilling and illuminating."—LA Times "A hypnotic psychological thriller." —People A chance encounter sparks an unrelenting web of lies in this new gripping and complex psychological thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Girl. She sees the teenage girl on the train platform, standing in the pouring rain, clutching an infant in her arms. She boards a train and is whisked away. But she can't get the girl out of her head… Heidi Wood has always been a charitable woman: she works for a nonprofit, takes in stray cats. Still, her husband and daughter are horrified when Heidi returns home one day with a young woman named Willow and her four-month-old baby in tow. Disheveled and apparently homeless, this girl could be a criminal—or worse. But despite her family's objections, Heidi invites Willow and the baby to take refuge in their home. Heidi spends the next few days helping Willow get back on her feet, but as clues into Willow's past begin to surface, Heidi is forced to decide how far she's willing to go to help a stranger. What starts as an act of kindness quickly spirals into a story far more twisted than anyone could have anticipated. More Praise: "Hypnotic and anything but predictable." —Kirkus, starred review "A superb psychological thriller…stunning."—Publishers Weekly, starred review Don't miss Mary Kubica's chilling upcoming novel, She's Not Sorry, where an ICU nurse accidentally uncovers a patient's frightening past... And look for the new editions of The Good Girl, Every Last Lie, Don’t You Cry and The Other Mrs. featuring brand new covers! More edge-of-your-seat thrillers by New York Times bestselling author Mary Kubica: The Good Girl Every Last Lie Don’t You Cry When the Lights Go Out Local Woman Missing Just The Nicest Couple The Other Mrs. She’s not Sorry

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

Chicago-based author Mary Kubica follows up her bestselling psychological thriller, The Good Girl , with another keep-you-guessing story. Pretty Baby fits the bill of domestic noir—it’s the story of a strained marriage and small encounters that take on a sinister sheen. Investment banker Chris was initially drawn to his wife, Heidi, because of her “bleeding heart”, but these days her tenderheartedness and desire for connection are a turn-off to both him and their teenage daughter, Zoe. As Heidi becomes obsessed with helping a homeless teen mother with a dark past, Kubica rattles our nerves by shifting perspectives and revealing key information in dribs and drabs.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUN 15, 2015

Kubica follows her acclaimed debut, 2014's The Good Girl, with a superb psychological thriller. Heidi Wood's husband, Chris, and 12-year-old daughter, Zoe, are used to her rants about recycling, poverty, and literacy, as well as her endless, depressing stories about the immigrants and refugees she meets through the Chicago nonprofit for which she works. But her family didn't expect Heidi to invite homeless teen Willow Greer and her infant, Ruby, to live with them. Heidi, whose dreams of a large family ended when she had a hysterectomy to save her life, becomes obsessed with Willow and especially Ruby, even as her marriage frays and she ignores Zoe. Afraid that Willow could be violent, Chris tries to find out her background and whether Ruby is even her baby. A series of flashbacks shift among the points of view of Heidi, Chris, and Willow as this heartbreaking tale about obsession, foster care, and the debilitating effects of unacknowledged grief builds to a stunning conclusion. 10-city author tour.

Customer Reviews

Wonderful narrator; well-written and thoroughly engaging. I could not put it down.

Excellent!!

Loved this book!! It had me enthralled from beginning to end!!

Pretty baby

I always enjoy books by this author and this one was no different. Well written with enough suspense to keep me turning the pages.

Sex Work, Academia and Pain That Resists Diagnosis

Three memoirs recount past harm — consensual and not.

Credit... John Gall

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By Jessica Ferri

• Published Oct. 6, 2022 Updated Oct. 10, 2022

Chris Belcher’s entertaining debut, PRETTY BABY: A Memoir (260 pp., Avid Reader, $27), recounts how a West Virginia adolescent who read Foucault and Derrida went on to become “L.A.’s renowned lesbian dominatrix.” Her work is as much about money and financial precarity as it is about sex and sexuality, if not more so. Having moved to California for a Ph.D. program in English, Belcher finds herself in her mid-20s “at the end of my financial rope,” collecting food stamps and considering selling her eggs when a new girlfriend, Catherine, suggests she join her in working at a “B.D.S.M. dungeon” on Venice Boulevard. “Needing the money is always more present than anything we might have to bury inside,” Belcher writes. It is the only thing preventing her from having to return to her small town, with its small-town mentality.

But the drag, too, is essential to her survival. After developing her nascent homosexuality in high school and college, when she presumed that queerness required her to be “butch,” she now finds herself reveling in the performance of über-femininity. “Domination is one of the only professions in which femininity is worth more than masculinity,” she writes, “and I was building my femininity to sell.” When Belcher brings Catherine home to meet her parents, her father expresses a new approval of her appearance: She’s slimmed down and grown out her long hair. “I had fashioned my femininity as an appeal to other women’s fathers,” she reflects, but “it also appealed to my own. I had made my way back to him, his pretty baby.”

Juggling her careers in sex work and academia, the author lays bare the soul-crushing difference in pay: “My adjunct professorship at a state college paid me $800 per month,” for hours upon hours of lecturing, reading and grading. By contrast, a single domination client pays her “$1,200 for four hours of cathartic suffering ,” and then a few more hours sleeping in a cage.

On one job, Belcher meets a young man at a bar where he’s paid her to publicly reject him. They look as if they could be on a Tinder date, she thinks, until she remembers how a friend told her about a real Tinder date she’d been “afraid” to leave. “Feeling like I’ve just gotten away with something,” Belcher realizes: “It’s not just the money. It’s that I get to say no.”

Speaking up doesn’t come so easily to most. Three months after the 2016 presidential election, Elissa Bassist suffered from blurred vision and debilitating headaches, neither the first nor the last symptoms of a mysterious, chronic illness. In HYSTERICAL: A Memoir (244 pp., Hachette, $29), the author recounts the two years she spent going from one doctor’s office to another, only to receive one diagnosis again and again: “Nothing Is Wrong With You.”

When she complains to two gynecologists that her “vagina is broken,” one prescribes “more sex, a 19th-century recommendation based on curing hysteria,” and the other tells her “it’s psychological.” A third finally determines she has a ruptured cervix. “Being socialized is almost like being gaslit into mental illness,” she writes. It’s no surprise that women are more likely than men to be misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all. As Bassist’s mother says, about everything from medicine to the fit of a seatbelt, “It’s a man’s world.”

Bassist compares misogyny to an iceberg, whose visible peak represents the more obvious forms of violence like murder and rape. But also damaging is the unseen “gray area” of sexual pressure, rape culture and mansplaining. “Hysterical” was written before Roe v. Wade was overturned, and reading it now feels a bit like an exercise in self-punishment. We know that hetero-patriarchy is all about power and control. But what to do about it? Bassist’s self-deprecating style masks an unwieldy thesis, and both author and reader are left overwhelmed by its lack of focus. In “King Kong Theory,” Virginie Despentes describes the constant scrutiny women writers must endure: “Talking about things that should remain secret, being exposed in the newspapers. … The public shame is comparable to being a whore.”

After nearly giving up on writing (thinking, “Silence is for the best”), Bassist realizes this approach is effectively equivalent to suffering under a false or nonexistent diagnosis. Writing, she reads in psychology studies, even “correlated with improved immune function.”

“It wasn’t only that I thought I was going to die when I was sick,” she writes, “but that I thought I was going to die with so much unsaid.”

In I’M NOT BROKEN: A Memoir (324 pp., Vintage, paperback, $17), Jesse Leon writes that he kept his own silence about his childhood trauma in 1980s San Diego for decades. Bullied by his white classmates for his Mexican, working-class heritage, at 11 he’s raped and serially assaulted by a shopkeeper who then intimidates him into returning to the shop twice a week for years, so that hundreds of other men can pay to rape him too. When Leon does tell the police and a therapist about the abuse, no one takes action. The shopkeeper vanishes into thin air.

Still in junior high, Leon continues performing sex work because it pays him “more in a few minutes of work than my mom makes in a week with her … minimum-wage job as a school cafeteria worker.” He drinks and does drugs to numb himself to his and his beloved mother’s traumas: A victim of abuse herself, Amá is an Indigenous woman working two jobs while battling serious illness. She tries not to let her son slip through the cracks; but her own cracks are more like canyons.

What saves Leon is his education. After high school he enrolls in a college-prep program, and then goes from community college to Berkeley to a master’s program in public policy at Harvard. His studies help him see the inherited trauma of his culture. “I started to question why, as a person of Mexican descent, I always said ‘Mande’ or ‘Mandeme usted’ instead of ‘¿Que?’ as most other Spanish-speaking cultures do,” he writes. “It made me angry to realize how deeply servitude and subservience have been engrained in my people by colonization.” In a book limited by its directness, the reader longs for more reflective moments like this one.

Leon begins each of three sections with a story about his father’s lineage of Mexican revolutionaries from the gold mines of the Sierra Madre. Leon’s healing begins when he is able to choose his own context. Where his “guarded, private, machista” father “rarely talked about his life,” Leon finds relief in confession. He attends Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings while in school, and begins “writing every day.” While studying abroad in Spain — where his ability to speak Spanish belies the foreignness he feels — he comes out as gay, feeling a new freedom to explore his sexuality without the pressures of his culture’s hypermasculinity. “I let go of my perceptions of manhood and machismo and went with the flow,” Leon writes. “It was ecstasy.”

Jessica Ferri is the author of “Silent Cities New York” and “Silent Cities San Francisco.” Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Economist and NPR.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, pretty baby.

The first time I see her, she is standing at the Fullerton Sta­tion, on the train platform, clutching an infant in her arms. She braces herself and the baby as the purple line express soars past and out to Linden. It’s the 8th of April, forty-eight degrees and raining. The rain lurches down from the sky, here, there and everywhere, the wind untamed and angry. A bad day for hair.

The girl is dressed in a pair of jeans, torn at the knee. Her coat is thin and nylon, an army green. She has no hood, no um­brella. She tucks her chin into the coat and stares straight ahead while the rain saturates her. Those around her cower beneath umbrellas, no one offering to share. The baby is quiet, stuffed inside the mother’s coat like a joey in a kangaroo pouch. Tufts of slimy pink fleece sneak out from the coat and I convince myself that the baby, sound asleep in what feels to me like utter bedlam—chilled to the bone, the thunderous sound of the “L” soaring past—is a girl.

There’s a suitcase beside her feet, vintage leather, brown and worn, beside a pair of lace-up boots, soaked thoroughly through.

She can’t be older than sixteen.

She’s thin. Malnourished, I tell myself, but maybe she’s just thin. Her clothes droop. Her jeans are baggy, her coat too big.

A CTA announcement signals a train approaching, and the brown line pulls into the station. A cluster of morning rush hour commuters crowd into the warmer, drier train, but the girl does not move. I hesitate for a moment—feeling the need to do something —but then board the train like the other do-nothings and, slinking into a seat, watch out the window as the doors close and we slide away, leaving the girl and her baby in the rain.

But she stays with me all day.

I ride the train into the Loop, to the Adams/Wabash Station, and inch my way out, down the steps and onto the waterlogged street below, into the acrid sewage smell that hovers at the cor­ners of the city streets, where the pigeons amble along in stagger­ing circles, beside garbage bins and homeless men and millions of city dwellers rushing from point A to point B in the rain.

I spend whole chunks of time—between meetings on adult literacy and GED preparation and tutoring a man from Mum­bai in ESL—imagining the girl and child wasting the better part of the day on the train’s platform, watching the “L” come and go. I invent stories in my mind. The baby is colicky and only sleeps in flux. The vibration of approaching trains is the key to keeping the baby asleep. The woman’s umbrella—I pic­ture it, bright red with flamboyant golden daisies—was man­handled by a great gust of wind, turned inside out, as they tend to do on days like this. It broke. The umbrella, the baby, the suitcase: it was more than her two arms could carry. Of course she couldn’t leave the baby behind. And the suitcase? What was inside that suitcase that was of more importance than an um­brella on a day like this? Maybe she stood there all day, waiting. Maybe she was waiting for an arrival rather than a departure. Or maybe she hopped on the red line seconds after the brown line disappeared from view.

When I come home that night, she’s gone. I don’t tell Chris about this because I know what he would say: who cares?

I help Zoe with her math homework at the kitchen table. Zoe says that she hates math. This comes as no surprise to me. These days Zoe hates most everything. She’s twelve. I can’t be certain, but I remember my “I hate everything” days coming much later than that: sixteen or seventeen. But these days every­thing comes sooner. I went to kindergarten to play, to learn my ABCs; Zoe went to kindergarten to learn to read, to become more technologically savvy than me. Boys and girls are enter­ing puberty sooner, up to two years sooner in some cases, than my own generation. Ten-year-olds have cell phones; seven- and eight-year-old girls have breasts.

Chris eats dinner and then disappears to the office, as he al­ways does, to pour over sleepy, coma-inducing spreadsheets until after Zoe and I have gone to bed.

The next day she’s there again. The girl. And again it’s raining. Only the second week of April, and already the meteorologists are predicting record rainfall for the month. The wettest April on record, they say. The day before, O’Hare reported 0.6 inches of rain for a single day. It’s begun to creep into basements, col­lect in the pleats of low-lying city streets. Airport flights have been cancelled and delayed. I remind myself, April showers bring May flowers , tuck myself into a creamy waterproof parka and sink my feet into a pair of rubber boots for the trek to work.

She wears the same torn jeans, the same army-green jacket, the same lace-up boots. The vintage suitcase rests beside her feet. She shivers in the raw air, the baby writhing and upset. She bounces the baby up and down, up and down, and I read her lips— shh . I hear women beside me, drinking their piping-hot coffee beneath oversize golf umbrellas: she shouldn’t have that baby outside. On a day like today? they sneer. What’s wrong with that girl? Where is the baby’s hat?

The purple line express soars past; the brown line rolls in and stops and the do-nothings file their way in like the moving products of an assembly line.

I linger, again, wanting to do something , but not wanting to seem intrusive or offensive. There’s a fine line between help­ful and disrespectful, one which I don’t want to cross. There could be a million reasons why she’s standing with the suitcase, holding the baby in the rain, a million reasons other than the one nagging thought that dawdles at the back of my brain: she’s homeless.

I work with people who are often poverty stricken, mostly im­migrants. Literacy statistics in Chicago are bleak. About a third of adults have a low level of literacy, which means they can’t fill out job applications. They can’t read directions or know which stop along the “L” track is theirs. They can’t help their children with their homework.

The faces of poverty are grim: elderly women curled into balls on benches in the city’s parks, their life’s worth pushed around in a shopping cart as they scavenge the garbage for food; men pressed against high-rise buildings on the coldest of January days, sound asleep, a cardboard sign leaned against their inert body: Please Help. Hungry. God Bless. The victims of poverty live in substandard housing, in dangerous neighborhoods; their food supply is inadequate at best; they often go hungry. They have little or no access to health care, to proper immunization; their children go to underfunded schools, develop behavioral prob­lems, witness violence. They have a greater risk of engaging in sexual activity, among other things, at a young age and thus, the cycle repeats itself. Teenage girls give birth to infants with lowbirth weights, they have little access to health care, they cannot be properly immunized, the children get sick. They go hungry.

Poverty, in Chicago, is highest among blacks and Hispanics, but that doesn’t negate the fact that a white girl can be poor.

All this scuttles through my mind in the split second I won­der what to do. Help the girl. Get on the train. Help the girl. Get on the train. Help the girl.

But then, to my surprise, the girl boards the train. She slips through the doors seconds before the automated announce­ment— bing, bong, doors closing —and I follow along, wondering where it is that we’re going, the girl, her baby and me.

The car is crowded. A man rises from his seat, which he gra­ciously offers to the girl; without a word, she accepts, scooting into the metal pew beside a wheeler-dealer in a long black coat, a man who looks at the baby as if it might just be from Mars. Passengers lose themselves in the morning commute—they’re on their cell phones, on their laptops and other technological gadgets, they’re reading novels, the newspaper, the morning’s briefing; they sip their coffee and stare out the window at the city skyline, lost in the gloomy day. The girl carefully removes the baby from her kangaroo pouch. She unfolds the pink fleece blanket, and miraculously, beneath that blanket, the baby ap­pears dry. The train lurches toward the Armitage Station, soar­ing behind brick buildings and three and four flats, so close to people’s homes I imagine the way they shake as the “L” passes by, glasses rattling in cabinets, TVs silenced by the reverbera­tion of the train, every few minutes of the livelong day and long into the night. We leave Lincoln Park, and head into Old Town, and somewhere along the way the baby settles down, her wailing reduced to a quiet whimper to the obvious relief of those on the train.

I’m forced to stand farther away from the girl than I’d like to be. Bracing myself for the unpredictability of the train’smovements, I peer past bodies and briefcases for the occasional glimpse—flawless ivory skin, patchy red from crying—the mother’s hollow cheeks—a white Onesies jumpsuit—the des­perate, hungry suction on a pacifier—vacant eyes. A woman walks by and says, “Cute baby.” The girl forces a smile.

Smiling does not come naturally to the girl. I imagine her beside Zoe and know that she is older: the hopelessness in her eyes, for one, the lack of Zoe’s raw vulnerability, another. And of course, there is the baby (I have myself convinced that Zoe still believes babies are delivered by storks), though beside the businessman the girl is diminutive, like a child. Her hair is dis­proportional: cut blunt on one side, shoulder length the other. It’s drab, like an old sepia photograph, yellowing with time. There are streaks of red, not her natural hue. She wears dark, heavy eye makeup, smeared from the rain, hidden behind a screen of long, protective bangs.

The train slows its way into the Loop, careening around twists and turns. I watch as the baby is swaddled once again in the pink f fleece and stuffed into the nylon coat and prepare myself for their departure. She gets off before I do, at State/Van Buren, and I watch through the window, trying not to lose her in the heavy congestion that fills the city streets at this time of day.

But I do anyway, and just like that, she’s gone.

Copyright © 2015 by Mary Kyrychenko

Pretty Baby by by Mary Kubica

• Genres: Fiction , Psychological Suspense , Psychological Thriller , Suspense , Thriller
• paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Mira
• ISBN-10: 0778318745
• ISBN-13: 9780778318743
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