KBOO's Between the Covers reporter Jennifer Kemp and guest reporter Desmond Fuller interviewed So Much Pretty author Cara Hoffman. So Much Pretty is a harrowing, provakative and exhilerating recent novel dealing with small town politics and personal and societal accountability. Hoffman takes the reader to a faltering town in upstate New York where an ambitious Cleveland journalist, a family of DIY countercultural New Yorkers and their fierce and imaginative daughter, and members of the town's industrial agricultural elite all become entangled in the murder of a young, local woman, Wendy White. So Much Pretty is told from the vantage points of multiple characters, jumping back and forth in time, finally arriving at a startling conclusion. A murder mystery on the surface, So Much Pretty delves much deeper into issues of linguistic integrity, economics, rural and urban mentalities, the secret wonders and childhood, environmental degredation and sexual violence.
- KBOO