So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman

[redqueen]

First you’re taught to fear a phantom, a man in black, a man with a knife, a man who’ll pounce in dark alleys. Well-intentioned women—mothers, aunts, teachers—will train you to protect yourself: Don’t wear your hair in a ponytail; it’s easier to grab. Hold your keys in one hand; hold your pepper spray in the other. Avoid dark alleys. When you reach young adulthood, the lessons change. They acquire an undertone of disgust: Don’t drink so much. Don’t wear such short skirts. You’re sending mixed signals; you’re putting yourself at risk.

If you follow the advice and it never happens—if you end up one of the three out of four—you can convince yourself that safety is a product of your own making, a reflection of inherent goodness. But if you’re paying attention, you realize something doesn’t add up. Because it keeps happening: to your sisters; to your friends; to little girls and grown women you’ll never meet, in places like Cleveland, Texas; Steubenville, Ohio; New Delhi. Good people, bad people, neutral. It keeps happening in TV shows and novels and movies—they open on the missing girl, the dead girl, the raped girl. If you’re paying attention, you begin to realize that it isn’t happening. It is being done. And you are not safe. You have never been safe. You were born with a bulls-eye on your back. All you have ever been is lucky.

Cara Hoffman’s 2011 novel So Much Pretty opens on the dead girl. Her name is Wendy White; she’s been missing for five months, and within the first fifty pages we learn that her body “was put to use for months before being found.” In another book, my heart would sink, reading those words. Among many other things, I’m tired of the way this story is told in fiction: from the point of view of the male detective, grizzled and weary, shaking his head over some beautiful broken body. The man represents cynicism; the body, innocence. By the end, his jaded worldview will be confirmed, or he will be saved—either way, he’ll need to see the body. I’ve read enough of this genre to know I’m tired of it. I’m tired of the way it puts women’s bodies to use, as footnotes. The dead girl is the beginning of the man’s story. Being dead, hers has ended before page one.

But So Much Pretty is not a typical crime novel; the men trying to solve Wendy’s abduction, rape, and murder are background players at most. Instead, Hoffman jumps through time and space and points of view, to tell a story that’s as much about one woman’s rape as it is about an entire culture. Weaved through the mystery of Wendy’s death is the story of another young women—Alice Piper, manic and pixie; a brilliant, beloved, bizarre teenage girl. The point at which Wendy and Alice converge is the crux of the book; Wendy’s death aids Alice’s realization that the world will stand by and watch as women are hurt, again and again, with no recourse. “I felt sad about her body,” Alice thinks of Wendy, as it begins to click. “Which was like my body…. It would hardly be rational to accept that I live in a thing made of flesh that people capture, hide, and then wait in line to rape.” Once she understands, Alice doesn’t just let fear and anger calcify inside her; she doesn’t buckle under the weight of the bulls-eye. Alice acts.

...

http://www.femalegazereview.com/post/41368816393/so-much-pretty-by-cara-hoffman

Have you read this book? It's definitely going on my list.

[seabeyond]

1. excellent. i read a lot. lots. and this is so true. i have about stopped reading men authors

cause it is dominate in their storytelling. though so "respectful" of the dead girl, NOT. i am so tired of rapes being a mere form of entertainment for the male audience, even in the horror of it, still a side bar.

look at clint eastwood movies. about all of them are off the premise of a rape and he is the hero to stop or avenge. does does it say about this man that all his movies have to have rape or attempted rape in it, for the male entertainment of hero.

[redqueen]

6. I can't think of any Eastwood movies...

All I can seem to think of are the spaghetti westerns... I know he's done a lot since then but I can't think of one.

[ismnotwasm]

2. It's on-line and I just bought it

I read several reviews including interviews with the author; it sounds amazing; thank you-

[redqueen]

3. Sounds compelling doesn't it?

After reading some of the reviews on Amazon I'm kinda nervous to read it, but I want to.

[ismnotwasm]

4. I just went for it

I read several reviews and an interview with the author, but it was this article--one of this first that came up on google--that actually clinched it for me

'So Much Pretty': The Ugliest Novel In Years -- I Couldn't Put It Down
"So Much Pretty" is set in an upstate New York community that's as menacing as the Georgia woods in "Deliverance." Once farmland, now it's not much of anything. It seems entirely possible that a local kid --- or three, or five --- could decide they can take a girl and hold her so they can fuck her any old time they please. And there, just getting to be kind of pretty, is Wendy White, a hometown girl who works as a waitress....

Wendy is one of three females who drive this novel. Another is Stacy Flynn, a feisty young reporter from the local paper. She's from Cleveland, she's won a Polk Award --- she knows Wendy is alive, and close by, and that when Wendy's body is found, "stupidity became a form of politeness." And then there is Alice Piper, 15, a genius, a free spirit --- and, now, an amateur sleuth.

Without dropping any spoilers, the most exciting thing about this book is that it takes a big turn --- it almost begins again --- when Wendy's body is found. Let's just say that someone craves justice for Wendy. And has an astonishing way to get it.

When I finished "So Much Pretty," I was desperate to talk to someone. Why not the author? So Cara Hoffman and I had a phone call...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-kornbluth/so-much-pretty-the-uglies_b_834844.html

[redqueen]

5. Thanks...

I'm looking forward to reading it now.

Still though, its gonna be hard. All those missing girls... every year...

[ismnotwasm]

7. Truth to tell, authors like Stephan King

Address this but more in the form of a literary device instead of a literary topic. Kings wife was a feminist in collage, and he has definite feminist tendencies in his writing, but that's not his purpose. I'm look to reading this book, it's not what I usually read, but it's a form of horror to me, even though it's tagged as a "thriller"