10 Sep 2010 19:30:56
It is a story about there the 13-year-old girl Elaine Emerson — Lainey to her friends — where we can understand that there is the sort of teen typically found in fiction — "Twilight"-obsessed, textspeak-fluent, desperately wanting to be older. Lainey has a MySpace page, even though her mother has forbidden her to join and she doesn't meet the social network's minimum age requirement of 14.
Passing herself off as 16, Lainey flirts online with a boy named Zach — only Zach's not 16 either. He's much older, and his interest in Lainey has nothing to do with high school dances or behind-the-bleachers make-out sessions.
Readers get a glimpse of what this online predator does want from Lainey in the prologue, in which the unnamed villain paints while listening to a tape of an evangelical preacher discussing women's sexual purity. This is apparently done solely to establish the age range of girls he wants, those on the brink of sexual maturity. However, the evangelical angle falls by the wayside, neither loose end nor red herring.
And that's one of the disappointments with Hoffman's tale, which is otherwise as gratifying as an episode of "Law & Order: SVU," with sympathetic victims, heroic yet troubled police detectives and a flawed but motivated task force dedicated to rescuing abducted children. It's impossible not to finish the book, once started.
Yet Hoffman piles on a lot of unnecessary drama. She saddles her protagonist, Florida Department of Law Enforcement Special Agent Bobby Dees, with a missing teen of his own. Though circumstances surrounding her disappearance are pretty clear — she ran away and doesn't want to be found — Dees begins worrying that she's been caught by the serial killer he's hunting. Though his fears are understandable, the stakes are just as high without this personal investment, especially since sharp readers will figure out how this subplot will turn out.
Reading about how Dees and his colleagues investigate Lainey's stepfather knowing that he's not the killer is also trying, though this part of the story does, in tandem with the main plot, create an interesting spectrum of sexual exploitation. Still, the sleazy, unfaithful, disinterested stepfather comes across as a caricature, as does Lainey's mother, Debra.
The advice Lainey remembers from her mother at the beginning of the story — "You should never put anything in writing or in pictures that you wouldn't want to see or read on the front page of The New York Times" — doesn't exactly jibe with the hostile, uncooperative woman Dees meets in his investigation. Granted, her rebellious older daughter has given Debra cause enough to mistrust the police, and her conviction that Lainey has simply run away is believable enough, but the overall portrait is of a woman who doesn't know a thing about her daughter — and doesn't really care.
"Pretty Little Things" does succeed in several ways. A great deal of research clearly went into the writing, yet the copious amount of statistics and other information about missing children never weighs down the narrative or makes the dialogue too expository.
Hoffman raises quite a few socio-economic issues that factor into missing-children investigations, and this is also welcome. Finally, Lainey's transition from innocent to hostage is heartbreaking, harrowing and terrifying, and there is no easy resolution to her story.
Passing herself off as 16, Lainey flirts online with a boy named Zach — only Zach's not 16 either. He's much older, and his interest in Lainey has nothing to do with high school dances or behind-the-bleachers make-out sessions.
Readers get a glimpse of what this online predator does want from Lainey in the prologue, in which the unnamed villain paints while listening to a tape of an evangelical preacher discussing women's sexual purity. This is apparently done solely to establish the age range of girls he wants, those on the brink of sexual maturity. However, the evangelical angle falls by the wayside, neither loose end nor red herring.
And that's one of the disappointments with Hoffman's tale, which is otherwise as gratifying as an episode of "Law & Order: SVU," with sympathetic victims, heroic yet troubled police detectives and a flawed but motivated task force dedicated to rescuing abducted children. It's impossible not to finish the book, once started.
Yet Hoffman piles on a lot of unnecessary drama. She saddles her protagonist, Florida Department of Law Enforcement Special Agent Bobby Dees, with a missing teen of his own. Though circumstances surrounding her disappearance are pretty clear — she ran away and doesn't want to be found — Dees begins worrying that she's been caught by the serial killer he's hunting. Though his fears are understandable, the stakes are just as high without this personal investment, especially since sharp readers will figure out how this subplot will turn out.
Reading about how Dees and his colleagues investigate Lainey's stepfather knowing that he's not the killer is also trying, though this part of the story does, in tandem with the main plot, create an interesting spectrum of sexual exploitation. Still, the sleazy, unfaithful, disinterested stepfather comes across as a caricature, as does Lainey's mother, Debra.
The advice Lainey remembers from her mother at the beginning of the story — "You should never put anything in writing or in pictures that you wouldn't want to see or read on the front page of The New York Times" — doesn't exactly jibe with the hostile, uncooperative woman Dees meets in his investigation. Granted, her rebellious older daughter has given Debra cause enough to mistrust the police, and her conviction that Lainey has simply run away is believable enough, but the overall portrait is of a woman who doesn't know a thing about her daughter — and doesn't really care.
"Pretty Little Things" does succeed in several ways. A great deal of research clearly went into the writing, yet the copious amount of statistics and other information about missing children never weighs down the narrative or makes the dialogue too expository.
Hoffman raises quite a few socio-economic issues that factor into missing-children investigations, and this is also welcome. Finally, Lainey's transition from innocent to hostage is heartbreaking, harrowing and terrifying, and there is no easy resolution to her story.
