
Ivy Marshall wasn't expecting the summer before starting high school to end the way it did...
She had so many plans, from exploring the sprawling back fields of her town with her best friend, Robyn, to swimming in the muddy waters of Lake Scugog. Becoming the neighbourhood outcast when her mother became ill didn’t quite fit into her itinerary. Ivy hadn’t anticipated that the summer would bring death—so somewhere along the way, she decided it never had.
Almost two decades later, Ivy’s buried secret still follows her around everywhere she goes, affecting every misguided decision she makes as an adult, silently weighing down each step she takes away from her little town. The Pretty Place, her childhood refuge, harbours tragedy just beneath the surface, but only there can she unearth the truth...
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Leslie started writing over twenty-five years ago, when her first poems and novellas were published only in her diaries.
Determined to break out of that “publishing” niche, Laura left her small town of Port Perry to study writing and communication, graduating with an advanced journalism diploma from Humber College. From there she found herself thriving in the tech industry, where she quickly worked her way up to head of marketing and communications at a Toronto-based software company.
In 2018, Laura finally took the leap to full-time writer, fulfilling a life-long dream and completing her debut novel, The Pretty Place.
Laura lives with her two dogs and her husband in Brooklin, Ontario. In her spare time, she listens to, writes, and makes music.
SONGS FROM THE PRETTY PLACE
Throughout the novel, songs are mentioned to immerse the reader in the mind and happenings of the main character's story. Some songs in the playlist didn't make the final edit of the novel, while others are only included because they're ever-present in the real-life chapters of the author's day to day—especially while she writes!
Excerpts from the novel



A snippet from Laura Leslie's second novel: "NOT EVERYTHING THAT'S SUDDEN IS UNEXPECTED" - Release date: Fall 2022
Why am I the one having to do this? I thought, as I gingerly approached the body. The room was cold and painfully clean as if someone believed bleach could scrub away the finality of death. In a way, I guess it could, couldn’t it? I’ve watched enough prime-time crime TV to know that if you planned to kill someone you better have a few jugs of Javex readily available for the cleanup. But this was different, there was no hiding the death that filled this room, no one was trying to get away with murder. The crooked sign on the metal door I’d just slipped through stated it loud and proud, “MORGUE”. A place where death inevitably congregated and medical careers went to die. A place where devastated family members went to confirm their worst nightmares and in my case, a place where those no longer related gingerly approached the body. The body. His body. Paul’s body.
I could tell before the sheet was lifted. I was anything but cursory. I remembered his height, the depth of his feet when he lay on the ground, the tiny bumps and ridges that comprised the side-profile of his face. I remembered the width of his shoulders and the valley of his concave chest. I remembered the shell that made him Paul, even if everything within it had changed in the last year. Dissipated, fleeing from inside him as if even his former self no longer wanted to be associated with his likeness. And what was it all for? I wonder now, wherever he is, if he’s relishing in his decision, a triumph from the afterlife. Or, had his suicide been an accident, a failed attempt to garner more sympathy—a thought I wasn’t able to determine as more or less painful.
“Stop, you don’t have to, I know it’s him,” I said as the diener reached up over Paul’s head searching for the corners of the thinly-veiled covering that kept us separated. It was as though what was under the sheet and what was over top were two different worlds. A dichotomy of reality in which the two futures presented were equally undesirable but in entirely different ways.