Such a Pretty Smile is a creepy, mind-bending, paranormal style horror with elements of body horror and some fairly graphic gore. This is not for the faint of heart in terms of atmospheric description. DeMeester's writing is calmly calculating, with a plot that reveals in slow, peeling moments delivered by unreliable narrators.

The book is dark and disturbing and delves into ideas of sexism and sexual oppression. The descriptions of misogyny were realistic in a way that had me both cringing and irritated and the repetitive description of female characters as some form of hysterical made me want to scream. These emotional responses were cleverly elicited in the writing and I think there is a lot of latent talent in the narrative.

However, I wasn't wowed by the plot or the characters. The "bad" girls seemed to blend together for me, which muddied the dual timeline approach and made that angle of writing less intriguing and effective. There were moments I did find intriguing and tense, but overall I just found myself sadly bored. There was a lot of repetition in both events and vocabulary usage. While some of this was undoubtedly intentional to drive home underlying points, it just grew irritating for me. I don't like when authors write in a way that look like they assume their readers are slow to pick up the hints.

There will absolutely be an audience for this strongly feminist and unique horror, but I was just left wanting a bit more. I'm a fan of weird, dark books, but this just didn't quite hit the mark for me.

* Disclaimer: I received a copy of this novel from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. *