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So Much Pretty

by Cara Hoffman (Goodreads Author)

3.24 of 5 stars 3.24 · rating details · 1,690 ratings · 516 reviews

When she disappeared from her rural hometown, Wendy White was a sweet, family-oriented girl, a late bloomer who’d recently moved out on her own, with her first real boyfriend and a job waiting tables at the local tavern. It happens all the time—a woman goes missing, a family mourns, and the case remains unsolved. Stacy Flynn is a reporter looking for her big break. She mov...more When she disappeared from her rural hometown, Wendy White was a sweet, family-oriented girl, a late bloomer who’d recently moved out on her own, with her first real boyfriend and a job waiting tables at the local tavern. It happens all the time—a woman goes missing, a family mourns, and the case remains unsolved. Stacy Flynn is a reporter looking for her big break. She moved east from Cleveland, a city known for its violent crime, but that’s the last thing she expected to cover in Haeden. This small, upstate New York town counts a dairy farm as its main employer and is home to families who’ve set down roots and never left—people who don’t take kindly to outsiders. Flynn is researching the environmental impact of the dairy, and the way money flows outward like the chemical runoff, eventually poisoning those who live at the edges of its reach. Five months after she disappeared, Wendy’s body is found in a ditch just off one of Haeden’s main roads. Suddenly, Flynn has a big story, but no one wants to talk to her. No one seems to think that Wendy’s killer could still be among them. A drifter, they say. Someone “not from here.”

Fifteen-year-old Alice Piper is an imaginative student with a genius IQ and strong ideals. The precocious, confident girl has stood out in Haeden since the day her eccentric hippie parents moved there from New York City, seeking a better life for their only child. When Alice reads Flynn’s passionate article in the Haeden Free Press about violence against women—about the staggering number of women who are killed each day by people they know—she begins to connect the dots of Wendy’s disappearance and death, leading her to make a choice: join the rest in turning a blind eye, or risk getting involved. As Flynn and Alice separately observe the locals’ failure to acknowledge a murderer in their midst, Alice’s fate is forever entwined with Wendy’s when a second crime rocks the town to its core.

Stylishly written, closely observed, and bracingly unexpected, So Much Pretty leads the reader into the treacherous psychology of denial, where the details of an event are already known, deeply and intuitively felt, but not yet admitted to, reconciled or revealed.(less)

ebook, 304 pages

Published March 15th 2011 by Simon & Schuster

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Nov 27, 2012 Laila rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Apr 07, 2011 Lynn rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was not an easy book to get into. There are multiple points of view as well as several time frames so the reader must pay strict attention in order to move with the story. A girl disappears. A reporter thinks she has an idea about the disappearance but she is from "away" and is disregarded. An unworldly girl genius, raised by a pair of back-to-the-earth doctor parents and their college friends also knows something. Are they really the only ones who know what is happening, or are they the on...more

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May 21, 2011 Kim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: first-reads

I first saw this book reviewed on npr.org and immediately added it to my "To-read" list. The premise of the book is fascinating and "So Much Pretty" definitely lived up to my expectations.

The book was a little difficult to get into. I wasn't quite sure where it was leading, but when a story involves the disappearance of a pretty girl in a small town - it is bound to be an important story. That is what I would call "So Much Pretty," an important story.

Some of the characters are ecccentric, just...more

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Jun 16, 2012 Melissa rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: thriller, 12x12-challenge, 2012-challenges, abc-challenge, first-reads-shelf, social-issues, young-adult, i-own

****PLEASE NOTE I WON THIS FROM A GOODREADS GIVEAWAY****

I didn't get into this book nearly as much as I thought I would. There were just too many perspectives and too much going on for me to really get into it. I don't have the book with me to go into as much detail as I would like to, but let's just say it wasn't all that gripping.

I did enjoy Alice, as a character, but I didn't feel for her as much as I would have liked toward the end of the novel. Plus there seemed to be a lot of information m...more

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Apr 09, 2013 Llama-jean rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: east-coast-book-club

I will say that this book took me a long time to get into and a long time to finish. It bounces around with multiple perspectives and frames and I found that once I put it down I had to go back to figure out the people in the next chapter. 'Did this character already have an intro? *flip flip*'

However, I adored Alice's character and I did enjoy the snippets we received from Wendy. I felt that numerous perspectives could have been cut out and the book could have been reduced in size...

But I felt...more

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Apr 04, 2013 Mal Warwick rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Unbearable suspense and extraordinary characters in a novel that grapples with today’s greatest ethical challenges

I can’t get Alice Piper out of my head. Here she is, dashing off a 7th grade paper in English prose worthy of a graduate student. There she is again, fearlessly leaping from bar to bar on the high wire in her parents’ barn. Still again, she is deeply engrossed in a probing philosophical discussion with her parents at age 6. Alice is a bundle of special gifts, a phenomenon.

On its most...more Unbearable suspense and extraordinary characters in a novel that grapples with today’s greatest ethical challenges

I can’t get Alice Piper out of my head. Here she is, dashing off a 7th grade paper in English prose worthy of a graduate student. There she is again, fearlessly leaping from bar to bar on the high wire in her parents’ barn. Still again, she is deeply engrossed in a probing philosophical discussion with her parents at age 6. Alice is a bundle of special gifts, a phenomenon.

On its most fundamental level, So Much Pretty is the story of Alice Piper and her parents, from the time of her birth through her mid-teens. But this is no cookie-cutter coming-of-age novel. It’s an inquiry into ethical conduct in an age of moral ambiguity. It’s a study of rural America struggling for survival in a declining industrial economy. It’s a critique of industrial farming. And it’s a novel of suspense that relentlessly drags the reader with increasing urgency toward a conclusion that no one is likely to guess.

Alice and her parents, Gene and Claire Piper, both physicians, have moved from New York City to the upstate town of Haeden, population 2,000, driven by a compulsion to avoid the ethical complications of the city and find a simpler life on the land. Gene devotes himself to promoting organic farming and environmental awareness while Claire brings in a modest income from work at a nearby health clinic. Their “family,” close friends Michelle (“Mickey”) and Constant, both physicians too, are no longer close by. Mickey has enlisted in Doctors Without Borders and moved to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Constant (“Con”) has taken a job with a shady pharmaceutical giant to test new drugs for a salary of $300K, money he has used to buy the land where the Pipers are homesteading and to help out them and his wife from time to time.

The pivotal event in So Much Pretty takes place after Alice has entered high school. Wendy White, a likable young woman who works as a waitress in the local diner, has gone missing, and the whole town, the Pipers included, are swept up in the months-long search for her (or, as feared, her body). But the timeline in this beautifully crafted novel is twisted and turned on itself a dozen times like a cat’s cradle gone mad, so that the reader learns of the young woman’s disappearance very early in the book. Hoffman takes us on a roller-coaster ride through time, ricocheting from the early 1990s in New York City to the late 2000s in Haeden and back again, again and again, and from the perspective of one character after another. Along the way, she paints vivid pictures of many of the players in this morality play: Stacy Flynn, George Polk Award-winning big city journalist who has come to edit Haeden’s little newspaper and research the local consequences of environmental crime; Captain Alex Dino, the good-old-boy police chief who insists that only “drifters” can commit serious crime in Haeden; Wendy White, emerging from anonymity as her adolescent fat melts away and she finds her first real boyfriend.

So Much Pretty was Hoffman’s first novel to reach a wide audience. The New York Times Book Review termed it the Best Suspense Novel of 2011.

Hoffman appears to be as intriguing a character as her protagonist. Raised in upstate New York herself in a place much like Haeden, she dropped out of high school and moved to Europe, working for a time in a hotel in Athens. Back in upstate New York, where she was raised, she worked her way into a job, and ultimately a decade, as an investigative journalist for a series of newspapers; gave birth to a son; and became involved with a series of “alternative” — we used to call them “underground” — ventures, including a “learning collective” and the long-running newspaper, Fifth Estate. Clearly, writing the story of Alice Piper came naturally to her.(less)

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Jun 23, 2012 Laura rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

There was so much potential in this book. Chapter starters like, "I have her baby teeth saved in a box in my dresser." But the book never went anywhere. With the story told by the POV of a dozen characters, told through narrative, newspaper articles, diary entries, audio transcriptions and interviews... the story is so jarring and lacks flow. It takes effort to read this, akin to a textbook, but you're not learning anything. It isn't even escapism that rewards you for your hard work, because the...more

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Jun 20, 2012 Leslie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I found this book absorbing and interesting, but I consider it only half complete.

Unfortunately, while the author seemed to have a good sense for what makes "outsiders" move to the country and get off the grid, she remains clueless about rural communities themselves.

The book turned somewhat polemical about violence against women. The author offered no insight about the perpetrators and their families. They were just one-dimensional bad guys. The book contained a lot of condescension toward rur...more

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Jun 14, 2012 Julia Miele Rodas rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bcc-reading-challenge

There's no way around it--this is a horrifying book. It came to me as a loan from Marianne Pita, the Chair of the English department at Bronx Community College, who was duly impressed by the talent of author Cara Hoffman, who is a part-time member of our department. But, while I share Marianne's admiration, I also found the book appalling.

A word here about the writing: Hoffman is certainly gifted and the book certainly merits the praise which it has earned. It is everything the back jacket says-...more There's no way around it--this is a horrifying book. It came to me as a loan from Marianne Pita, the Chair of the English department at Bronx Community College, who was duly impressed by the talent of author Cara Hoffman, who is a part-time member of our department. But, while I share Marianne's admiration, I also found the book appalling.

A word here about the writing: Hoffman is certainly gifted and the book certainly merits the praise which it has earned. It is everything the back jacket says--poetic, riveting, fearless--and more; it is a beautifully crafted text, playing at the boundary of affectively charged and objective. Even more: the narrative structure, offering fragments from the perspective of individual characters, is composed with unusual intelligence and precision. I go even further: this is actually an important book, its impact drawing the reader into a political and social concern--the ubiquitous abuse and murder of women--that has been so popularized that it has lost its sense of reality. We expect that women will be tortured and killed; it is part of daily life. A regular part of the news, we glance and turn away and go on to other things. Emotional impact close to zero. We're anaesthetized.

Hoffman takes the headline and forces us to live with it. Really. Which is why, despite its craft and importance, I hated this book. Drawn in by the suspense and the beauty of the language, I felt committed to the book even while I felt it forced upon me a kind of relationship with the torture and murder of women that I absolutely did not want to have. In fact, its fragmentary, almost kaleidoscopic structure acts in a way to victimize the reader in a manner that could be compared to the torture of its principal subject. I felt trapped by the book, drawn ineluctably into the next frame in the narrative sequence, even while dreading what was to come. And, to make things worse, through the multiple narrative perspectives, I felt drawn, too, into complicity with those who torture and murder women.

This is an amazing book, but I also hated it; it interfered with my sleep, my relationship, my sense of self.

13 May 2012(less)

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May 31, 2012 Evanston Public Library added it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, mystery

So Much Pretty, by Cara Hoffman, is a mystery with heavy themes: physical and sexual violence, lost innocence, corporate wrongdoing, and revenge, to name a few. It's also a novel about three women: Wendy White, a young waitress who has disappeared from the small, upstate New York town of Haiden; Stacy Flynn, a reporter looking for a big story about the environmental impact of the large dairy farm that is Haiden's primary employer; and Alice Piper, a teenaged genius living in Haiden with her quir...more

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May 14, 2012 Dawn Vanniman rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I received this book from the publisher in return for an honest review.

SO MUCH PRETTY is a mystery and a thriller. But it's not the kind where the events could never happen. It's the kind where you hope they never happen to YOUR family, but we read about them all too frequently. This novel is not YA, but still something I can see YA readers picking up to read as they get older. I would recommend this one only for the oldest of the group. There's swearing, sex, violence and general human atrociti...more I received this book from the publisher in return for an honest review.

SO MUCH PRETTY is a mystery and a thriller. But it's not the kind where the events could never happen. It's the kind where you hope they never happen to YOUR family, but we read about them all too frequently. This novel is not YA, but still something I can see YA readers picking up to read as they get older. I would recommend this one only for the oldest of the group. There's swearing, sex, violence and general human atrocities.

A small town girl disappears, only to reappear months later...dead...less than a mile from her apartment. She's a nice girl, just got her own apartment, waitresses, graduated a couple years ago, just began dating the well-to-do son of the local dairy farmer. When she disappears, the townspeople insist it had to be a drifter, it couldn't possibly be one of them.

There's three main voices in this book:
Wendy - the missing girl. The chapters from Wendy are few and far between, but are hard hitting.

Stacy Flynn - Reporter/Editor of the local paper. She came from the big city as she's sure she's going to find her big story out here in the boonies.

Alice Piper - 15 yo genius daughter of hippie parents who were doctors in NYC and moved her to live off the land and be part of the community. However, the community still considers them outsiders and weirdos after all these years. But people like Alice, she's smart, athletic, friendly.

The characters are interesting, as is the story. However, I had to concentrate while reading it. There's a lot going on - jumping viewpoints, lots of undercurrents politically and within the community. I felt like the only character I really got to know was Stacy Flynn, and then still only on the surface. Alice, although apparently filled with moral outrage, seemed entirely to calculating and aloof. Wendy - there wasn't enough for me to feel anything more than sorrow for a wasted life. I wanted to connect with her, to care about her, but she seemed to be more of a vehicle of the story than someone that really mattered.

I really felt like too much time and detail was spent on Alice's parents - what they did in the past, what they're doing now, their political thoughts and ideals. Also the dairy farm issues about contaminating the water supply - which was brought up and never mentioned again. It seemed like not that much mattered. I know that her parents influenced Alice, but it seemed that they influenced her in a way that they didn't mean to...as it may be with a lot of parents. I felt like some of that space could have been used to make me see Wendy more clearly.

I'm not really sure how I feel about this book. Have you read it? What do you think? (less)

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Apr 16, 2012 Jenna rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I don't know how this book got through the editing process. Didn't anyone bother to tell Cara Hoffman that multiple narrators in a shifting timeline is a bad idea? Didn't her editor tell her that her didactic prose and endless direct characterizations are cheap shot short cuts for doing the real work of writing? How about writing a chapter that is about real action rather than posturing? Or if you are going to put two 'types' of people against each other, in this case simple locals versus educat...more

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Nov 27, 2011 Erica added it · review of another edition

On the surface this seems like a book I would love. A girl disappears in an economically depressed town. It sounded like Gillian Flynn crossed with Bonnie Jo Campbell, with a little bit of Chelsea Cain mixed in, and those comparisons were not wrong. But there was something missing here for me. I couldn't find anywhere to settle my sympathies and my interests--of the four characters I'd say were "main," I only felt like we really got to know the less interesting (and less important to the plot) t...more

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Jul 05, 2011 Janet rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book was painful to read. The concept for the book sounded promising and there were several paths this book could have followed that might have been riveting. However, the path Hoffman chose did not work for me.

In addition to the disjointed and clumsily-told story itself, I really do not care for Hoffman's writing style -- there were way too many incomplete sentences and all of the characters seemed so flat and lifeless. The writing feels like Hoffman sat down and pored over each word, but...more

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Jun 25, 2011 Neely Hudson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm really torn between four and five stars. This is the best, most intelligent and thoughtful, suspense novel that I've read in a long time... maybe ever. I love the big questions that Cara challenges us with: are "progressive" ideas and opinions really progressive? Can we make a big enough impact carrying on in our own quiet ways, or do we need to DO something BIG to make changes... This book also delighted me because it wasn't absolutely predictable. Some of the suspicions I had of the charac...more

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Jun 18, 2011 Britni rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm really struggling to find the words for how I feel about this book. I'm also struggling to write a review without first going back and reading the book a second time, but I'm going to try to give you an honest review from my first read because I may feel different after I've put the story all together.

A key to this book is that it is contemporary fiction. It's written in a style that I can only relate back to the movie Momento, except the story is being told from the point of view of dozens...more I'm really struggling to find the words for how I feel about this book. I'm also struggling to write a review without first going back and reading the book a second time, but I'm going to try to give you an honest review from my first read because I may feel different after I've put the story all together.

A key to this book is that it is contemporary fiction. It's written in a style that I can only relate back to the movie Momento, except the story is being told from the point of view of dozens of people instead of one. The story is told in small pieces that take you forward and backward, up and down, as you try to piece together where each individual piece fits into the bigger puzzle. The book is divided into small "chapters," that skip among numerous characters in the book. Some characters who seemingly don't add a thing, but I'm sure again on my second read, I'd find those characters were actually game-changers. Some of the chapters have years, some of them don't. Some of them are supposed audio recordings where you can only hear one side of the conversation, some are letters, and some are third-person narratives recounting memories. And though at times it doesn't seem like it, all of those pieces somehow add up to one thrilling story.

The only thing I can tell you about the plot without giving anything away is that the story overall is centered around three girls - Wendy, Alice, and Stacy Flynn. The three lived in the same community and were physically just acquaintances but emotionally, somehow connected on a deeper level. And all three in their own way stood for and did what they thought was right, even if society would have chosen a different path.

I will say that this book was one of the most surprising, thrilling, and unique that I've read in a really long time. As many of the reviews on Amazon put it, it was one of the ugliest books I've ever read but incredible at the same time. I wish I could give it five stars and would except for the ugly "F" word that kept coming up throughout the book. For that one reason I can't recommenced it to everyone but if you like contemporary lit and that's not something that bothers you, So Much Pretty is definitely a book to read. If for no other reason, to remember the beauty of being truly and utterly surprised and shocked by a book.

This is Cara Hoffman's debut novel, and I will definitely be picking up whatever she decides to write next. (less)

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Jun 08, 2011 Vegantrav rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Of the new books published this year, Cara Hoffman's So Much Pretty is my favorite (so far).

As So Much Pretty begins, we learn that a young woman, Wendy White, has been murdered. There are also some initial clues that a high school girl, Alice Piper, is in some sort of trouble, and it seems to be connected, with Wendy's murder.

The novel then jumps back and forth through time, telling us about Alice's parents and their early years together as well as the present time, just after the murder, and t...more Of the new books published this year, Cara Hoffman's So Much Pretty is my favorite (so far).

As So Much Pretty begins, we learn that a young woman, Wendy White, has been murdered. There are also some initial clues that a high school girl, Alice Piper, is in some sort of trouble, and it seems to be connected, with Wendy's murder.

The novel then jumps back and forth through time, telling us about Alice's parents and their early years together as well as the present time, just after the murder, and the intervening years. We meet all the key characters in the story and learn their history with a primary focus on Alice and on the local newspaper reporter/editor, Flynn, and Wendy's background also receives a good deal of consideration, though not as much as Alice and Flynn. These three women are the focus of the story.

This is a suspense story where the tension builds really rather slowly, but after about 200 pages, I was completely hooked, and when the major turning point of the novel finally begins (where we, at last, learn what the trouble with Alice is), I was completely stunned: I did not at all see this turn of events coming, and I really don't think most readers will either, yet it fits perfectly with the narrative logic. I don't want to give anything away, so I won't say what this event is here, but I think most readers will be shocked not only by the event but also its aftermath.

This is a great mystery story with some really fascinating characters and a fabulous ending. I highly recommend it.

****SPOILER ALERT****

Okay, so the event to which I was referring above is Alice's mass murder of seven of her male high school classmates who were responsible for the rape and murder of Wendy. (While these boys did not carry out the murder, they had raped Wendy and could have intervened to save her from being murdered had they wanted to do so.) Alice carries out the murders in Columbine-like fashion at her high school, gunning the boys down methodically, and she pulls it off in such a fashion that there is no solid evidence that she is the murderer, though she is the prime suspect and is arrested. From the narrative trajectory, it appears that Alice will go to trial and likely be acquitted due to insufficient evidence, but before that happens, Alice successfully escapes from a hospital after faking a suicide attempt and flees from her home in upstate New York to start a new life in California.(less)

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May 30, 2011 Ashley rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Cara Hoffman’s So Much Pretty explores the aftermath of a kidnapping and killing in a rural New York town. Told from multiple points of view, the story is meant to enrage us against the violence against women that is perpetuated every day.

I wanted to love this book. It came highly recommended by another book blogger I follow. But while it does tell a compelling story and does highlight the epidemic of violence against women, So Much Pretty fell short of my expectations.

One of the things that mak...more Cara Hoffman’s So Much Pretty explores the aftermath of a kidnapping and killing in a rural New York town. Told from multiple points of view, the story is meant to enrage us against the violence against women that is perpetuated every day.

I wanted to love this book. It came highly recommended by another book blogger I follow. But while it does tell a compelling story and does highlight the epidemic of violence against women, So Much Pretty fell short of my expectations.

One of the things that makes the book an interesting read is the multiple viewpoints that reveal the story. At the same time, having snippets of insight into the characters kept me from really identifying and empathizing with any of them. I think that was part of what made the book harder for me to read. I was never able to connect closely enough with Stacy Flynn, a reporter who had moved to town to cover an environmental story and becomes obsessed with the kidnap and murder of Wendy White. As a result of this disconnection, the righteous anger at what happened to Wendy- and the commentary on violence against women in general-fell flat. I never quite connected with it.

Alice Piper, a precocious student, seeks her own resolution to the dilemma of accepting violence as a part of life or choosing to fight it. And fight is a deliberate turn of phrase there. I get Alice’s intelligence and quirkiness, and I was rooting for her on some level, but again, the lack of connection to her kept me from really caring a lot about what she decided.

Finally, I thought the local dairy, which employs most people in the town, and its associated environmental issues were going to play a bigger part in the narrative. Instead they are built up to an extent and then largely disregarded. It felt disjointed.

As I write this, though, I wonder if this disconnection, this indecisiveness, isn’t part of what Hoffman intended. There are so many social issues- violence against women chief among them- that have become so commonplace to us that we’re almost indifferent to hearing about them. Perhaps that is the point. Perhaps Hoffman is telling us to wake up, to take a stand, to say that enough is enough. Not to the extreme measures that Alice chooses, but something.

I feel like I owe the book a second read. Or it could just be that this is one that I say is good, but not great. It impacted me enough that I hid a golf club under the bed, just in case. In all honesty, I finished this book months ago, but have put off writing about it because I am not completely sure how I feel about it. Certainly, if you have any interest in literary fiction, in social issues and how society relates to them, then So Much Pretty is worth a read.(less)

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May 18, 2011 Daniella rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Or so much drek! I've read some great reviews of this "novel" and was excited to read it. The excitement ended when the book started. Did I read the same book as these rave reviewers? I hardly think so.

I read a quote (not sure what its from but I found it on Amazon) from Hoffman..."as a journalist, I've always thought 'why' was the most important question". On this, at least, the "author" (DO NOT QUIT YOUR DAY JOB!) and I agree. Why indeed? Why did I waste money on this book? Why did I waste ti...more Or so much drek! I've read some great reviews of this "novel" and was excited to read it. The excitement ended when the book started. Did I read the same book as these rave reviewers? I hardly think so.

I read a quote (not sure what its from but I found it on Amazon) from Hoffman..."as a journalist, I've always thought 'why' was the most important question". On this, at least, the "author" (DO NOT QUIT YOUR DAY JOB!) and I agree. Why indeed? Why did I waste money on this book? Why did I waste time on this book? Why did someone agree to publish this book?

To say this book was slow to start is a gross understatement. It never "started". The choppy writing style is something I'd give a failing grade for to a middle school student. I read the book to its end and I felt unsatisfied. The social commentary attempted in this ill thought out story rings hollow, specifically because the author (I reiterate, DO NOT QUIT YOUR DAY JOB) just tried too hard. Despite her overzealous efforts, she accomplished nothing with this book. The story is a real stinker. The writing style is hard on the brain and nearly painful to read. Reading this book made me feel like Hoffman was just trying overly hard (and failing) to be clever and witty. If her book speaks anything about her, she's neither.

If you set aside the sluggish, pathetic story line and the undisguised attempts at being the "smartest person in the room" with her writing, you still come up with something far less than mediocre. Where was the editor during the proofing phase of this book? It's poorly edited and it should never have made it past the reception desk at any reputable publishing house.

In the end, I couldn't even bring myself to donate this book to my local book drive. It went into the recycling bin with the remnants of products that served much more use to me than this atrocity in written form. I regret spending the money on the book but I'm embarrassed to return it to the shop I picked it up from because I don't even want people to know I once thought it might be readable.

I try hard not to judge an author but a debut but this one was so bad that I can honestly tell you that I will not read anything else Hoffman puts out...should such a thing once again make it through the editing process to become available to the outside world. The thoughts in Hoffman's head should do us all a favor and stay there.(less)

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May 16, 2011 Vicki rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Without focusing on the specifics of the story or general techniques used to tell this story, I'll make a few comments on the writing (which is how a mediocre story comes to life or a great premise for a story is lost due to a lack of writing talent). I found Hoffman's "So Much Pretty" to be written in such a way that the author seems to want to show that she can be clever, but instead it feels overwrought and manipulated. Based on her writing style and allusions to anarchism and environmentalis...more

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May 05, 2011 Danielle rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This debut novel was a hard book to read, for a handful of reasons. It builds very slowly, and there are numerous jumps in narrator, as well as to various points in the timeline of the story, both backwards and forwards. The narrators, too, for the most part, were steeped in a philosophical culture that I had little experience of, and the story did very little to educate me about the anarchist and anti-civilization philosophies they held. I found it difficult to identify with them, or understand...more

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Apr 05, 2011 Elizabeth Scott rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Wow! This was a...you know, it's been days since I've read this and I still catch myself thinking about it.

The basic plot is that a young woman disappears in a small town and when her body is found, everyone seems to think a stranger/drifter killed her, except for two people, a local (and newcomer) reporter, and Alice, who was one of the most fascinating fictional teenagers I've ever read about. (It's Alice who really caught me--days later, I still don't know if what she did was because she wan...more

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Mar 29, 2011 switterbug (Betsey) rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Imagine you are the "outsider" and reporter, Stacy Flynn. You came to this farm town in upstate New York via Cleveland to find the "big-picture" story on rural waste dumping here in off-the-grid Haeden. You're twenty-four, alert as a cat, keen to pounce like a tiger, with Malcolm X glasses, a postmodern flair, and a Mencken regard. You've won an award in the big city, and now that the Rust Belt stories are waning, you seek the newly pelted. But after several years of living among wind-battered f...more Imagine you are the "outsider" and reporter, Stacy Flynn. You came to this farm town in upstate New York via Cleveland to find the "big-picture" story on rural waste dumping here in off-the-grid Haeden. You're twenty-four, alert as a cat, keen to pounce like a tiger, with Malcolm X glasses, a postmodern flair, and a Mencken regard. You've won an award in the big city, and now that the Rust Belt stories are waning, you seek the newly pelted. But after several years of living among wind-battered farmhouses, tall white flagpoles, crumbled colonials, and broken-down buses, you're still waiting and suspicious of the omnipotent, industrialized local dairy farm while writing benign pieces about the latent, wall-eyed community.

You languish restively amid the cultural blankness of concrete and caved-in roofs, among the two thousand near-impoverished citizens and the rancid smell of garbage stabbing the air. Menace lurks beneath the folksy façade of the educationally challenged and is carried on the chemical stench of the industrial breeze of its one prosperous family. There is an unacknowledged power that controls its citizens. Here, where suppression and denial is as rooted and contagious as tree rot.

On April 3, 2009, when the naked, sexually brutalized dead body of Wendy White, a nineteen-year-old woman missing for five months, is dumped and subsequently found in a ditch, the meaning is lost on almost everyone. (This isn't a spoiler--it is the central conceit.) Now, survey the scene. Here is Flynn's story of toxic transgression, but the townspeople aren't talking, or they're talking trash and no one is listening. While people congregate on corners and slink into bars, the police promise they are "pursuing all avenues." The tight-knit community behaves with boilerplate banality and assumes that it must be a drifter or brought on by a cult of anarchists, the hippies who live here and their ilk of "environmental terrorists." The people hang onto apocryphal evidence as gospel. Now the town is praying for Wendy White, and the school observes a moment of silence.

More silence?

Alice Piper is a gifted teen and former swim teammate of Wendy. She is the sixteen-year-old daughter of the widely mistrusted and misconceived Pipers, Gene and Claire, who left their profession as physicians years ago to live a quiet self-sustainable life here in Haeden. They sought a place to reconcile their radical ideologies with the realities of the corporate industrial complex. The Pipers raised Alice to question authority--and to examine--not just see, and to engage--not just comply. Alice, like Flynn, can't simply mourn, move on, and accept an unsolved murder.

The fragmented form of the narrative mirrors the manifest structure of denial, and the gradual revealing of the facts incite the implacable cries of protest. The chapters seem jarring and incongruous at first, detached, non-linear, occupied with unreliable details, specious facts, and compromised evidence. But it reflects the process that Flynn goes through as an investigative reporter, receiving piles of unredacted evidence--exhibits, historical research, interviews, letters, school papers, and chronicles. The reader, like Flynn, is the source of the redaction. What materializes from the inchoate fog is the reader as character and fierce examiner of truth. The view from the pages is malignant and bracing. And that? That is the genius of the author, Cara Hoffman, who appeared to lock me out at the beginning but gripped me in its claw by the end.

This isn't a genre police procedural or conventional crime thriller. There's blood, but it's not gratuitous, and there's violence, but not in a vacuum. The everyday sexploitation in headlines and entertainment is exposed, like a raw nerve, and examined, with a naked eye, but not directly in the text in bankrupt slogans and empty bromides. It's finessed, as a corollary, not milked with pithy epiphanies. If anything, it is turned on its head. The desensitization of civilization results from decades of overgrazing in the vicarious thrill of the kill. The assault on our now denuded senses is acute. We know it. Even as we seek more, we feel less. And that is what Cara Hoffman understands. She doesn't condescend, she weeps. And so did I. And so will you. (less)

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May 25, 2012 Eileend rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

No spoilers.
Blurb: Brilliant and Dark. Very Dark. Possibly not for readers with children and vivid imaginations. Most similar to Sebold's Lovely Bones, but the difference with "So Much Pretty" is that (a) we get into the thoughts of many characters, and (b)you will see yourself and your neighbors at every turn.

Longer version:

About half-way through this novel, the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, "Teach Your Children" starting repeating in my mind. Not a sweet, lovely version, but a dark,...more

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May 08, 2012 Shana rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Dear Lord, do you ever start reading a book or watching a movie and just wish you hadn't because you know that where it is going is a terrible, awful place that you don't really want to go, but now that you've started, you feel like you have no choice but to go on and get to that terrible place it is taking you? Well, that's how I felt for most of this book right up until nearly the end.

In theory, I should have loved it. It deals with issues that are of long standing interest to me--violence aga...more Dear Lord, do you ever start reading a book or watching a movie and just wish you hadn't because you know that where it is going is a terrible, awful place that you don't really want to go, but now that you've started, you feel like you have no choice but to go on and get to that terrible place it is taking you? Well, that's how I felt for most of this book right up until nearly the end.

In theory, I should have loved it. It deals with issues that are of long standing interest to me--violence against women and representations of perpetrators. I have personal history with both of these, history that may more than account for my academic interest, so I was very excited to read a book so lavished with praise that dealt with these issues. Furthermore, unlike many of the reviewers, I was not put off by the narrative's fractured structure. Before I'd made up my mind that the book wasn't much, pretty or otherwise, I was reminded of Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, which also has a fractured structure and multiple points of view that heighten the mystery that are at its center. If So Much Pretty could achieve the quality of In the Lake of the Woods, well, so much the better.

However, nothing clicked. So many of the characters felt flat and, worse, false. They were caricatures more than characters. When Alice criticized Monique Wittig's Les Guerilleres for turning people into symbols, I thought, "Hello?!" As part of this critique, Alice says, "...it seems to be a really enormous flaw in logic. And really takes the pleasure out of reading about characters and what they want to do or who they are." I don't know that I agree with her about the logical flaw, but it certainly does take the pleasure out of reading about characters whose sole purpose seems to be to make the author's point about women being victims of violence.

To be clear, I don't disagree with the author's point, and the one good thing that came out of this novel for me was the righteous indignation at all the sh*t we women and good men accept as just par for the course. Today, a worker at Starbucks asked me a really inappropriate question about how I like things to feel in my mouth, and I get that he was just being funny and flirty and that stuff like that is usually considered okay because, hell, I've heard it a million times before said to me or other women and never once gotten upset, but reading this novel did make me ask whether I should accept that, whether it is okay. Who said that talking to a woman like that, a woman you don't know and have no personal relationship with, is okay? Why should it be? How does my staying silent and accepting that behavior make the world a less safe place for women to live?

That said, there was also a point at which the violence against women slipped into tabloid voyeurism. I began to wonder as I was reading about how much the novel was participating in what it meant to condemn. It had a dirty, trashy feeling at points; it felt like it was sexualizing the violence and even girls' bodies, and I just felt uncomfortable and icky. And I do get that there is good uncomfortable, that good art disturbs, but there is good disturbing and bad disturbing, and this was mostly not good disturbing.

Finally, the characters in this novel who take or are victims of extreme action--I'm trying no to give too much away here--are flat, like I said, and that not only disappointed me, it pissed me off. I felt like this novel had such potential, and it failed to live up to it on every level. Yes, it confronted shocking material and didn't flinch, perhaps was even brutal in it's directness, and that does take bravery, but beyond the shock and the anger, what's left?(less)

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Jul 15, 2011 Keetha rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So many people are wild about this book but I am not one of them.

I had issues with elements of the book and also with some of the scenes, graphic and distubring and awful, in the book. The book is told through multiple viewpoints, which I've seen done effectively, but it didn't work for me here. I couldn't get to really know anyone because the POV was always shifting.

It was confusing, too, keeping up with where we were and when we were - some of the narration was when a character was three year...more

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Feb 21, 2012 Kyle rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I make not like postmodern art but I love postmodern literature. Give me multiple perspectives, jumping around in time, and fragments to put together and I am a happy person. This novel had all of these and then it also had the cherry on top... it really surprised me.

This book was a recommendation from John Warner, aka the Biblioracle, based on the following five books I had previously read and enjoyed: number9dream by David Mitchell, Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, Dark Places by Gillian Flynn, The...more

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Mar 21, 2011 Rebecca Martin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The feeling of doom that hung over this book from the very beginning made the reading a heart-in-throat kind of experience. The events are supposed to take place in upstate NY, though I read it in Iowa and could very readily translate the portrayal of "family" (now corporate) farms and decaying small towns into that environment. This book has a lot to say about country and city, ideals and realities, and--most affectingly--about the disposable nature of women in a society that treats them as und...more

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Jun 06, 2011 Rosemary rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So much disappointment! I wasted my time with this poorly-written attempt at a novel after reading a positive review. Then, I went looking more carefully and saw that most every positive review on Amazon was published before the official release or within the first week it was out and was written by a professional reviewer who'd received this book for free. I guess getting paid by S&S is reason enough to promote junk.

Hoffman uses a bag full of literary 'tricks of the trade' to try to make t...more

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Mar 20, 2012 Dee West rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

This book arrived in the mail on my Birthday. How excellent is that?! I knew I'd won a book or two from Good Reads, but I forgot what they were and had no idea when they were coming. So when I tore open the package, it really was like a birthday present!

I didn't mean to read this book as quickly as I did. But I found my self thinking, "ok, just one more chapter..." and then I was done.

I wasn't immediately pulled into the book. It jumped...more

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“Sometimes she felt she had fallen asleep inside herself while she was wide awake working.” — 9 people liked it

“'A man can only take so much pretty walking back and forth in front of him.' He said pretty like he meant something else.” — 6 people liked it

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