87 books like Pretty Girls

Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross has got grit.

This book was recommended to me by my firefighter brother, who often reads what I call “he-man” books. The titles always have words like mutiny, bullets, gangsters, firestorm, etc. So, when he suggested I read this book, I had my reservations. (In fairness, the books he recommends consistently end up on my list of all-time favorites–I guess that’s what I get for pre-judging!) In any case, over the years, I have learned the one thing we both love in a protagonist–and now I have a name for it–is grit. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

I find this book to be an unsettling but impactful read, both thought-provoking and complex. We Need to Talk about Kevin follows the mother of a troubled teenager responsible for a school shooting.

It’s about nature versus nurture, the relationship between mother and child, and deeply seated guilt. It draws inspiration from real events, including the 1999 shooting at Columbine, which wasn’t the U.S.’s first mass shooting at a school, but it would become one of the most infamous.

Shriver’s novel raises unsettling questions about a mother’s guilt and self-justification and a community’s heartache and blame. I consider it to be a captivating and moving book.

Dionne’s book drew me in immediately with its provocative opening lines: “If I told you my mother’s name, you’d recognize it right away. My mother was famous, though she never wanted to be. Hers wasn’t the kind of fame anyone would wish for.”

Dionne divides the subsequent story between past and present, beginning with protagonist Helena’s hunt for her father after he escapes from prison, knowing he'll come for her. To track him, Helena uses the backwoods skills her father taught her as she grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula wilderness.

Through flashbacks, we learn the bizarre details of Helena’s upbringing as the child of a woman her father abducted as a teenager and held captive for years. Totally gripping.

To say I love this book is to say I love torture, which may not be accurate. It’s better to say it burrowed into my brain and stayed there for far too long. I don’t get scared easily. But this novel caught me differently.

This one freaked me out on a level I’d never experienced before. Why? Because it’s the kind of story that could happen to anyone, especially to dingbats like me. And make no mistake: Nick, the “hero” of this story, is a complete dingbat. I mean, he’s smart. But he makes so many believably bad decisions in the face of a ruinous situation to preserve his own interests that we’re reminded how no one is immune to situations that conspire at every level to defeat us.

This book just gets under your skin and stays there. It did mine.

This wonderful novel features a journalist, Mikala Blomkvist, searching for a highly respected, long-lost member of a notable family. Once again, government corruption is rampant in the investigation.

A special aspect of this novel is the introduction of Lisbeth Salander, a brash, tattooed young woman with an abrasive personality matched only by her singular skills. I loved this character, who is incredibly unique.

This novel has so many reasons to recommend it. It incorporates radical experimentation and horrifying surgeries being done in a bizarre hospital. To make it even more mysterious, there is a hurricane threatening the island which complicates the investigation of US Marshall Teddy Daniels searching for a patient who has disappeared.

I loved the creepy island hospital and the use of weather as a character.

Here’s another book better known for the excellent film adaption, but the novel actually brings the gritty, sometimes brutal daily life in the rural Ozarks alive in the mind’s eye more vividly than a movie ever could.

Daniel Woodrell’s atmospheric story of a teen daughter’s quest to bring her father back for his court date, dead or alive, is a simple narrative rendered with stark, almost Biblical prose. I particularly appreciated the author’s distinctive language and evocative imagery.

This was my first peek into the world of paranormal ghost stories through books. Before this spooky thriller, truth be told, I didn’t know there was such a genre as ghost thrillers. 

I will forever be grateful to Riley Sager for not only opening me up to such a captivating genre but for writing such an amazing story.

This book gives you the present perspective of a woman returning to a haunted house that ran her family away 25 years ago, alongside the perspective of what happened 25 years ago when she was a child from the lens of a “NYT-selling novel” written by her father. 

The twists are jaw-dropping.

I’ve read many thrillers in my genre touted for their mind-blowing twists, but which have left me disappointed. The Boys lives up to its hype. Totally.  

Ethan is a husband who has an extreme fear of parenting. To help him overcome his fears, his wife Barb arranges for them to foster two brothers. Ethan takes to his parenting role so diligently that Barb has to take a breather from the marriage while Ethan takes the boys on a biking trip to Italy.  

It is here—a little more than halfway through the novel—that the reader learns the shocking truth about the boys. Nothing prepared me for this twist. At all. Or, for the revelations and resolution that followed—all of which made the twist totally plausible and comprehensible.  

I read this within 12 hours; no one could pry this book from my hands.

There is something so truly shocking and morbid about how as women we love to read books on true crime, I personally believe it’s because we know that the possibility for this terror to become our reality is a possibility. 

And with Noelle’s brilliant writing, I truly couldn’t put the book down. Three women are brutally murdered by the same serial killer, and the story follows their perspectives as they haunt their killer and become ghosts.