on the shelf: so much pretty

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman
ISBN-13: 9781451616750
Synopsis: "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."

Review: I actually finished this book months ago. We get advanced editions of books sometimes at work and this seemed interesting. The synopsis on the back on my copy is a lot different (and confusing) than the one on the final edition of the book. I waited until this book actually came out so I wouldn't have to deal with any sort of repercussions that could have come about if I started spouting on about a book that wasn't out yet. On to the review now...

This book took a while for me to get through. It has a lot of twists and turns that make you want to keep reading to figure out how things end up, but I think that overall, there are too many perspectives and too many back stories that need to be related to the reader in order for the whole story to come together. I feel as though the back and forth with the phases in their lives could be difficult to follow at times.

Overall, the book was not bad. If it were a bad book, I would never have finished it. However, i did eventually become invested in the characters. I wanted their stories to be told, I just wish it were in a more coherent format that didn't require a little bit of back tracking on my part. I wouldn't discourage anyone from giving this book a try. The plot is great and the plot twists make it a worthwhile read. Just be prepared to be a little bit puzzled at times.