Review: "Fast Boys and Pretty Girls" by Lo Patrick

Fast Boys and Pretty Girls by Lo Patrick
Published July 2025 via Sourcebooks Landmark
★★★

Then, Danielle was fresh out of Georgia, a teenage model in New York. Not a star, but successful enough to have money in her pocket and an apartment of her own. Never mind that her family doesn't think she's made for a life outside of Georgia; never mind that she's fallen for a boy back home who never wants to leave the South; never mind that modeling has put a hold on the things she always thought she'd do, like go to college.

A girl should never be told she's pretty—so pretty it's going to pay the bills. (loc. 2678*)

Now, Danielle is back in Georgia, living in the decaying old house that her parents passed down to her. Her marriage works because her ideal is to stay home with her four daughters and her husband's ideal is to be gone for work for days at a time.

She keeps Then separate from Now—until the girls find skeletal remains in the woods behind the house, and Then comes crashing in. Because Danielle knows whose bones they must be.

Something about Southern fiction calls to me sometimes—that smell of hot humid air, I think, and in this case the combination of rural poverty and deeply entrenched pride. Danielle's mother in particular is an intriguing character; she reminds me of certain women I know (from various backgrounds) for whom life as not been easy and who were (for various reasons) dissuaded from pursuing their dreams.

The balance between Then and Now doesn't always align for me. Most of the story takes place in Danielle's modeling days, when she is young and bratty and determined to feel superior to her family and friends in Georgia. I actually love how low-key unlikeable Danielle is at that point—she's full of it, but she's written to be full of it, and she doesn't have the sophistication or finesse to, well, brag in a way that achieves the desired effect. It's way more interesting than Danielle being sweet and naive and perpetually hard-working.

I would have liked to see more of the Now, though, more of what's going on with the bones and how Danielle is processing it. We really don't see much of her world as an adult: not the ways the town has changed, not her husband and daughters, not the few other people she interacts with, not even her house. We also see very little from the police (or really anyone else) regarding the body—this isn't a mystery, and possibly the author wanted to steer clear of any whiff of mystery or police procedural, but I guess I expected more questions in the Now. The earlier timeline ends up feeling far more fleshed out than the later timeline, to the extent that I might have preferred the story to just...stay in the Then.

In the end this satisfied my occasional thirst for a certain stripe of Southern literature but didn't quite have the depth of plot and character development I was hoping for. Not a standout, but an interesting read.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.