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© 2006 HarperCollins. Heather McElhatton
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Pretty Little Mistakes, Million little Mistakes, Pretty Little Murder,
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Heather McElhatton: Pretty Little Mistakes
[Harper Collins]

Writer: Charles McNair
Issue 31

McElhatton is hot. This “interactive hyperfiction,” as
the publisher interactively hypes her first novel,
launches with a marketing campaign lauding “the first
interactive novel for adults.” Astonishingly branded as
a summer-reading book, PLM offers readers optional
prose paths that might just take all summer to
explore—at the end of chapters, the reader chooses
between alternate plot lines that lead to 150 possible
endings.

If you’re the kind of reader who likes, more or less, a
story told in a straight line, with familiar rising action,
characters who grow together, and if you need a
certain stability in fictional time, you’ll quickly choose
one option: early bedtime.

Others, with a taste for control, will enjoy PLM—this
book is a labyrinth, well-written enough to entertain on
a beach blanket, though less compelling to demanding
readers than other similarly experimental books. (See
Hopscotch in this month’s Dusted Off column.)

The most fascinating experiment here may be whether
PLM’s marketing of interactive hyperfiction actually
captures summer readers.

If yes, go to the bank.

If no, Pretty Little Mistakes will be a title of some
irony.