It’s Thomas Harris, it’s Lois Duncan…but no, it’s Kristi DeMeester, in complete confident control of your experience. It’s coming of age, it’s family secrets, it’s life in the balance, too.

'Wonderfully well written the dread, the enigma, build with each scene. Brilliantly paced, unsettling to the bone, and unapologetically fierce, Such a Pretty Smile is a powerful allegory for what it can mean to be a woman, and an untamed rallying cry for anyone ever told to sit down, shut up, and smile pretty. But Caroline’s past is a dark cellar, filled with repressed memories and a lurking horror that the men around her can’t understand.Īs past demons become a present threat, both Caroline and Lila must chase the source of this unrelenting, oppressive power to its malignant core. Her new psychiatrist waives her “problem” away with pills. But then the delusions begin to take shape―both in her waking hours, and in the violent, visceral sculptures she creates while in a trance-like state. At first, she blames the phantom sounds on her insomnia and her acute stress in caring for her ailing father. Snarling, barking, teeth snapping that no one else seems to notice. But soon Lila feels haunted from within, terrorized by a delicious evil that shows her how to find her voice―until she is punished for using it.Ģ004: Caroline Sawyer hears dogs everywhere. And not her mother―the infamous Caroline Sawyer, a unique artist whose eerie sculptures, made from bent twigs and crimped leaves, have made her a local celebrity. Not her father, who has a new wife, and a new baby. Not the school psychologist she’s seeing. Girls who don’t know when to shut up.Ģ019: Thirteen-year-old Lila Sawyer has secrets she can’t share with anyone. Known only as The Cur, he leaves no traces, save for the torn bodies of girls, on the verge of becoming women, who are known as trouble-makers those who refuse to conform, to know their place. There’s something out there that’s killing.

Such a pretty smile kristi demeester