What Pretty Gets You
Chandra Hoffman
Fiction
Fifth Generation Publishing LLC; 1st edition
March 15, 2021
278 Pages
“Get comfortable. Hoffman’s masterfully plotted tale of betrayal, secret-keeping, and unlikely sisterhood will keep you glued to your seat, turning pages well into the night.” – Abbey Lee Nash, author of Lifeline
19-year-old Maia works a kiosk at Philadelphia International Airport, waiting to be discovered and watching people’s lives take off while hers stays stagnant. When a handsome commuter charms her with stories of the perfect life in the snow-capped mountains of Colorado, she rashly follows him into a future she was not expecting.
Desperate to regain control of her life and sentenced to bedrest in her second pregnancy, Carolyn makes the dangerous decision to hire the young woman she suspects is sleeping with her husband to be their nanny. Friends close; beautiful enemies closer, she reasons. Carolyn and Maia harbor secret pasts.
What unfolds in Boulder over the summer exposes the gritty underbelly of their dreams and forces both women to question the bounds of loyalty, the complicated nature of female friendship, and the privilege and peril of physical beauty.
My Review
⛰️⛰️⛰️⛰️⛰️
Ah, the pretty people.
You know the ones; the girls who have legs for days, flat stomachs without a stretch mark in sight, and thick manes of hair that hold a curl on demand. The ones who can drink coffee but not use teeth whitener, who roll out of bed looking as though they have just spent an hour in hair and makeup. The boys that you want to climb like a tree; sexy, smoldering eyes you fall right into….the perfect pecs, hair and abs……whose hellos make your clothes come off and voices that feel like warm baths.
You know, pretty people. The ones to which life hands out all the passes. No rules apply, pass GO as many times as you want and let your pretty face bestow all its beauty on us common folk.
Us regulars have all wished we were one of the pretty people at one point or another in our lives; especially in those young teenage, awkward years where we were convinced of our ugly duckling-ness. We don’t really appreciate how uniquely beautiful we are until we are much, much older. The power that our smiles hold, the way our voices can shake knees.
And while the outside is what we are all initially attracted to (I mean, of course it is, we are visual animals), the hardest pill to swallow is when the outside doesn’t match what is inside. Sometimes, a beautiful face can hide very ugly secrets.
What Pretty Gets You opens with Maia, a beautiful nineteen year old working in an airport kiosk. A chance meeting with handsome west-coaster Joel finds Maia spontaneously leaving her life in Philly and following him home to Colorado, and eventually- through a fateful meeting- working for his pregnant wife, Carolyn.
Told back and forth through between the two women, the story takes a few dangerous turns, first with Maia’s and Joel’s affair and then, the emerging relationship between Carolyn and the young girl who helps her through her difficult pregnancy, cooking, cleaning and caring for her 4 year old daughter, Sasha. (Who -btw- is SO incredibly precious I canNOT even handle it).
I really wanted to hate Maia, but I found myself just loving that poor little unfortunate soul. Pretty or not, she had some tough baggage and watching her struggle was heartbreaking. Hoffman charges right into Maia’s past and lets us know life hasn’t always been easy her.
How she navigated through her first few days in Colorado was interesting to read. I felt like a passenger getting on a flight I KNEW was going down, but I took my seat anyway. I wondered if she would have survived, if not for her looks. There were few women who looked kindly to her; most of her admirers and those who wanted to be in her space were men. And while I got the impression Maia didn’t WANT that to be the case, she knew she had to use it in order to survive. The decisions she made were somewhat reckless….but, the author did a phenomenal job of showing us the decisions made by a young, beautiful woman who simply does what she needs to do to survive.
We see into Maia’s beautiful, sweet, scarred soul in the way she takes care of the lovable dog she rescues from an imminent death, and her love for the precocious Sasha.
Carolyn gives us a glimpse into her past as well- and how it is eerily similar to Maia’s. We slowly find out what events put Carolyn on the road to the woman she is today. While their stories each emerge separately, we see how both are running from decisions made a lifetime ago, and how their lives aren’t really that different. We see how Maia’s broken family unit may be part of her motivation to get on that plane, and how Carolyn still carries the scars from when she was seventeen.
An amazingly well written story of secrets, trust, family and the decisions we make when we are young and carefree.
Five stars!
Author Bio:
Chandra has lived in thirteen international cities and this wanderlust shaped her writing. In each novel, the setting is its own character. She writes about everyday scenarios; shining a light on the complexities of human nature through the voices of multiple narrators.
Chandra has been an orphanage relief worker in Romania, a horse trainer in the Caribbean, a short order cook in a hospital, the director of a US adoption program, an event planner and homeschooled on a remote island off Honduras while chronicling the adventure for the Huffington Post.
She is now settled back in her hometown outside of Philadelphia where she teaches writing and is the founder of the Summer Writing Retreat at Bryn Athyn College.
She lives with her husband, three children and a menagerie of horses, big dogs, needy cats and free-range chickens.
Author Links: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads
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