Amazon.com Review
Apparently satiated with the gentle, homespun charms of
Forrest Gump, Winston Groom enters the decidedly more menacing realm of blackmail, revenge, and torture in
Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl. Readers expecting guileless and unequivocal protagonists may find themselves shocked by Groom's purview; readers looking for stylish suspense, enigmatic players, and voice-over commentary like "No trap is as deadly as the one you set for yourself" may find themselves unable to put the book down.
The girl is Los Angeles TV news anchor Delia Jamison, a still ravishing fortysomething who has strenuously and repeatedly exercised her right to leave suitors bitterly heartbroken. Oblique, seductive, and often blunt to a fault, it seems that she has begun receiving lewd and vaguely threatening letters from--she postulates--a jilted ex. Enter another former beau, Oscar-winning screenwriter Johnny Lightfoot, who fortuitously bumps into her and is captivated all over again--not only by her beauty, but also by the mystery of her tormentor. When she presents Johnny with a list of suspects (i.e., past conquests), he resolves to unmask the letter writer.
Audacious almost to the breaking point, Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl is nonetheless good fun--literary candy rife with cat-and-mouse interrogations, neon clues, and campy misdirection. Though the story becomes increasingly implausible, it also starts to mirror its vacuous heroine: as the men who are ineluctably captive to Delia's beauty know, it's nearly impossible to look away. --Ben Guterson
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Groom (Forrest Gump) seems to have followed his best-known creation to Hollywood: if for Forrest "life is like a box of chocolates," for the protagonists here, life is like an old-fashioned detective thriller, replete with stock characters, stagey settings and convenient plot twists. "Drop-dead gorgeous" Delia Jamison is an L.A. television news anchor who has loved, and left, an astonishing array of men. When Delia starts to get threatening sexual letters and calls, she enlists the help of a sympathetic (and still-smitten) ex, Groom's narrator, screenwriter Johnny Lightfoot, who plunges into the investigation with amateurish enthusiasm and remarkable self-delusion. Delia is duplicitous and manipulative; she withholds key information from Johnny, from her husband Brad and from Brad's best friend, Rick, who owns "a big detective agency," yet welcomes Johnny's sleuthing (here, as elsewhere, Groom's desire to pay homage to 1940s Hollywood trumps probability and psychology). Groom invests Johnny's narration with Chandlerian cliches: "One thing was for sure, though?Delia was a woman of impenetrable contradictions." Seemingly everybody Johnny meets or knows reminds him of an actor in an old film (one fellow once "resembled a young Charlton Heston, but now he looked more like Sydney Greenstreet in Casablanca"), which comes off not as a tribute but as lazy characterization. Johnny eats good food, drinks fine wine, smokes premium cigars and plods gamely along until he stumbles across the solution to Delia's troubles, long after most readers will have figured it out. Groom winds up with a goofily violent climax, but this final action is hardly worth the price Johnny, and readers, have paid to get there. Ad/promo; BOMC and QPB selections; author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.