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WORK TITLE: When We Fly Away
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WEBSITE: http://www.alicehoffman.com/
CITY: Boston
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: LRC July 2023
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PERIODICALS
The New York Times Book Review Oct. 20, 2024, Ruth Franklin, “Before the Attic, an Ominous Dreamscape.”. p. 22.
Kirkus Reviews July 15, 2024, , “Hoffman, Alice: WHEN WE FLEW AWAY.”. p. NA.
Publishers Weekly vol. 271 no. 25 June 24, 2024, , “When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary.”.
Kirkus Reviews June 15, 2023, , “Hoffman, Alice: THE INVISIBLE HOUR.”. p. NA.
Booklist vol. 119 no. 17 May 1, 2023, Seaman, Donna. , “The Invisible Hour.”.
Publishers Weekly vol. 270 no. 18 May 1, 2023, , “The Invisible Hour.”. p. 49.
The New York Times Book Review Nov. 14, 2021, Ramos, Joanne. , “Bewitched.”. p. 40(L).
Kirkus Reviews Aug. 1, 2021, , “Hoffman, Alice: THE BOOK OF MAGIC.”. p. NA.
The New York Times Book Review Oct. 25, 2020, Lepucki, Edan. , “Witch Hunt.”. p. 21(L).
Kirkus Reviews Sept. 1, 2020, , “Hoffman, Alice: MAGIC LESSONS.”.
Kirkus Reviews July 15, 2019, , “Hoffman, Alice: THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW.”.
Moment Sept.-Oct., 2019. Schwartz, Amy E. , “The Magic of Alice Hoffman: HER NEW NOVEL TAKES ON THE HOLOCAUST WITH THE HELP OF A RARE FEMALE GOLEM.”.
The New York Times Book Review Oct. 13, 2019, Pols, Mary. , “The Bodyguard.”. p. 16(L).
BookPage Oct., 2019. Jackson, Matthew. , “The World That We Knew.”. p. 18.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction vol. 134 no. 3-4 Mar.-Apr., 2018. Hoffman, Alice. , “The Rules of Magic.”.
BookPage Oct., 2017. Rollwagen, Carrie. , “The Rules of Magic.”.
The New York Times Book Review Oct. 29, 2017, Corbett, Sue. , “Bewitched.”. p. 9(L).
Publishers Weekly vol. 263 no. 42 Oct. 17, 2016, Rosen, Judith. , “Surviving: Alice Hoffman’s 25th novel, Faithful, confronts coming-of-age and coming together.”.
BookPage Nov., 2016. Whitley, Carla Jean. , “Faithful.”.
The New York Times Book Review Nov. 20, 2016, Wecker, Helene. , “The Road Back.”. p. 22(L).
Kirkus Reviews June 1, 2015, , “Hoffman, Alice: THE MARRIAGE OF OPPOSITES.”.
BookPage Aug., 2015. McDaniel, Maude. , “The Marriage of Opposites.”. p. 23.
The New York Times Book Review Aug. 16, 2015, Kelly, Hillary. , “Mother’s Disapproval.”. p. 14(L).
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction vol. 128 no. 5-6 May-June, 2015. , “Nightbird.”.
The New York Times Book Review Apr. 12, 2015, Bardugo, Leigh. , “Steeped in Enchantment.”. p. 19(L).
Voice of Youth Advocates vol. 37 no. 6 Feb., 2015. Phillips, Donna L. , “Hoffman, Alice. Nightbird.”.
Kirkus Reviews Feb. 1, 2014, , “Hoffman, Alice: THE MUSEUM OF EXTRAORDINARY THINGS.”. p. NA.
The New York Times Book Review Feb. 23, 2014, , “Alice Hoffman.”. p. 7(L).
The New York Times Book Review Mar. 2, 2014, Weber, Katharine. , “Girlfish.”. p. 18(L).
Kirkus Reviews Apr. 15, 2013, , “Hoffman, Alice: SURVIVAL LESSONS.”.
Kirkus Reviews Apr. 15, 2011, , “Hoffman, Alice: THE DOVEKEEPERS.”.
Booklist vol. 107 no. 18 May 15, 2011, Wilkinson, Joanne. , “The Dovekeepers.”. p. 23.
Voice of Youth Advocates vol. 33 no. 4 Oct., 2010. Bilz, Rachelle. , “Hoffman, Alice. Green Witch.”. p. 366.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction vol. 119 no. 56 Nov.-Dec., 2010. De Lint, Charles. , “Green Witch.”.
Booklist vol. 107 no. 3 Oct. 1, 2010, Seaman, Donna. , “The Red Garden.”. p. 30.
Kirkus Reviews Oct. 15, 2010, , “Hoffman, Alice: THE RED GARDEN.”.
The New York Times Book Review June 7, 2009, Cain, Chelsea. , “Fairest of Them All.”. p. 14(L).
Kirkus Reviews Apr. 15, 2009, , “Hoffman, Alice: THE STORY SISTERS.”. p. NA.
Booklist vol. 105 no. 15 Apr. 1, 2009, Seaman, Donna. , “The Story Sisters.”. p. 5.
Kirkus Reviews Jan. 15, 2008, , “Hoffman, Alice: THE THIRD ANGEL.”. p. NA.
Booklist vol. 104 no. 7 Dec. 1, 2007, Seaman, Donna. , “The Third Angel.”. p. 5.
The New York Times Book Review Feb. 4, 2007, Thomas, Louisa. , “Family Failings.”. p. 18(L).
Kliatt vol. 41 no. 3 May, 2007. Kellerman, Carol. , “Hoffman, Alice. Incantation.”. p. 52.
Kliatt vol. 41 no. 3 May, 2007. Theiss, Nola. , “Hoffman, Alice. The ice queen.”.
Kliatt vol. 39 no. 5 Sept., 2005. Rosser, Claire. , “Hoffman, Alice. The foretelling.”.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction vol. 109 no. 4-5 Oct.-Nov., 2005. De Lint, Charles. , “The Ice Queen.”.
Kirkus Reviews vol. 72 no. 13 July 1, 2004, , “Hoffman, Alice & Wolfe Martin: Moondog.”. p. 631.
Kliatt vol. 38 no. 5 Sept., 2004. Rohrlick, Paula. , “Hoffman, Alice. Green angel.”.
Kirkus Reviews vol. 72 no. 10 May 15, 2004, , “Hoffman, Alice: Blackbird House.”. p. 461.
Publishers Weekly vol. 251 no. 25 June 21, 2004, , “Blackbird House.”. p. 42.
Publishers Weekly vol. 250 no. 18 May 5, 2003, Hall, Melissa Mia. , “The quest for a blue rose and other unexpected gifts: talks with Alice Hoffman.”. p. 196.
Publishers Weekly vol. 250 no. 18 May 5, 2003, , “The Probable Future. (Fiction).”. p. 196.
The New York Times Book Review vol. 108 July 6, 2003, Nimura, Janice P. , “Bewitched.”. p. 26.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction vol. 105 no. 6 Dec., 2003. De Lint, Charles. , “Green Angel.”.
Kliatt vol. 36 no. 3 May, 2002. Rohrlick, Paula. , “Hoffman, Alice, Indigo.”.
The New York Times Book Review vol. 106 no. 22 June 3, 2001, Benzel, Jan. , “Aquamarine. (Children’s Books in Brief).”. p. 49.
Booklist vol. 97 no. 18 May 15, 2001, Seaman, Donna. , “Blue Diary.”. p. 1707.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction vol. 100 no. 2 Feb., 2001. DE LINT, CHARLES. , “The River King.”. p. 31.
Publishers Weekly vol. 247 no. 23 June 5, 2000, , “THE RIVER KING.”. p. 71.
Publishers Weekly vol. 247 no. 33 Aug. 14, 2000, , “HORSEFLY.”. p. 355.
Publishers Weekly vol. 244 no. 24 June 16, 1997, , “Here on Earth.”. p. 44.
The Women’s Review of Books vol. 15 no. 6 Mar., 1998. Steinitz, Rebecca. , “Here on Earth.”.
The Antioch Review vol. 54 no. 1 winter 1996 pp. 106+. Gale , Antioch. Bick, Suzann. , “Practical Magic.”.
Publishers Weekly vol. 242 no. 12 Mar. 20, 1995, , “Practical Magic.”. p. 40.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction vol. 89 no. 6 Dec., 1995. de Lint, Charles. , “Practical Magic.”.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction vol. 86 no. 4 Apr., 1994. de Lint, Charles. , “Turtle Moon.”.
Publishers Weekly vol. 239 no. 7 Feb. 3, 1992, , “Turtle Moon.”. p. 61.
Publishers Weekly vol. 240 no. 48 Nov. 29, 1993, , “Second Nature.”. p. 53.
The Nation vol. 251 no. 18 Nov. 26, 1990, Pritchard, Melissa. , “Seventh Heaven.”.
Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including Magic Lessons: The Prequel to Practical Magic, The World That We Knew, The Rules of Magic, The Marriage of Opposites, Practical Magic, The Book of Magic, The Red Garden, the Oprah’s Book Club selection Here on Earth, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, and The Dovekeepers. She lives near Boston.
Full Biography
Alice Hoffman was born in New York City on March 16, 1952, and grew up on Long Island. After graduating from high school in 1969, she attended Adelphi University, from which she received a BA, and then received a Mirrellees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, which she attended in 1973 and 74, receiving an MA in creative writing. She currently lives in Boston.
Hoffman’s first novel, Property Of, was written at the age of twenty-one, while she was studying at Stanford, and published shortly thereafter by Farrar Straus and Giroux. She credits her mentor, professor and writer Albert J. Guerard, and his wife, the writer Maclin Bocock Guerard, for helping her to publish her first short story in the magazine Fiction. Editor Ted Solotaroff then contacted her to ask if she had a novel, at which point she quickly began to write what was to become Property Of, a section of which was published in Mr. Solotaroff’s magazine, American Review.
Since that remarkable beginning, Alice Hoffman has become one of the most distinguished novelists. She has published over thirty novels, three books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults. Her novel, Here on Earth, an Oprah's Book Club choice, was a modern reworking of some of the themes of Emily Bronte’s masterpiece Wuthering Heights. Practical Magic was made into a Warner Brothers film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Her novel, At Risk, which concerns a family dealing with AIDS, can be found on the reading lists of many universities, colleges and secondary schools. Hoffman’s advance from Local Girls, a collection of inter-related fictions about love and loss on Long Island, was donated to help create the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA. Hoffman has written a number of novels for young adults, including Aquamarine, Green Angel, and Green Witch. In 2007 Little Brown published the teen novel Incantation, a story about hidden Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, which Publishers Weekly chose as one of the best books of the year.
Hoffman’s work has been published in more than twenty translations and more than one hundred foreign editions. Her novels have received mention as notable books of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People Magazine. She has also worked as a screenwriter and is the author of the original screenplay “Independence Day,” a film starring Kathleen Quinlan and Diane Wiest. Her teen novel Aquamarine was made into a film starring Emma Roberts. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, Harvard Review, Ploughshares and other magazines.
Toni Morrison calls The Dovekeepers “... a major contribution to twenty-first century literature.” The story of the survivors of Masada is considered by many to be Hoffman’s masterpiece. The New York Times bestselling novel was adapted for television in a 2015 miniseries starring Rachel Brosnahan and Cote de Pablo.
Her most recent novels have received many accolades and are New York Times bestsellers. They include The Museum of Extraordinary Things, The Marriage of Opposites, and Faithful. Her novel, The Rules of Magic, is the prequel to her cult-classic Practical Magic. It was selected as a LibraryReads and Indie Next List Pick for October 2017, and was one of the Most Anticipated Books on iTunes. Reese Witherspoon picked it as her October 2017 Book Club read, remarking that the “story is full of magic, love, family, heartbreak and redemption.” Set in New York City at the cusp of the sixties, The Rules of Magic is a timeless story that reminds us that the only remedy for being human is to be true to yourself. The World That We Knew, published in 2019, is an exploration of humanity set in France during the Holocaust. Magic Lessons, book three in the Practical Magic series, was published in October 2020, and received praise from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The Boston Globe, and was a Book of the Month Top Pick for October. Book four in the Practical Magic series, The Book of Magic, was released in October 2021 and was selected as a Indie Next Pick and a LibraryReads Hall of Fame Pick.
Alice Hoffman
USA flag (b.1952)
Alice Hoffman was born in New York City on March 16, 1952 and grew up on Long Island. After graduating from high school in 1969, she attended Adelphi University, from which she received a BA, and then received a Mirrellees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, which she attended in 1973 and 74, receiving an MA in creative writing. She currently lives in Boston.
Genres: Literary Fiction, Young Adult Fantasy, Children's Fiction, General Fiction, Fantasy, Historical
New and upcoming books
August 2024
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The Bookstore Wedding
(Once Upon a Time Bookshop, book 2)September 2024
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When We Flew Away
February 2025
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The Bookstore Keepers
(Once Upon a Time Bookshop, book 3)
Series
Practical Magic
1. Magic Lessons (2020)
2. Rules of Magic (2017)
3. Practical Magic (1995)
4. The Book of Magic (2021)
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Water Tales
1. Aquamarine (2001)
2. Indigo (2002)
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Green
1. Green Angel (2003)
2. Green Witch (2010)
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Once Upon a Time Bookshop
1. The Bookstore Sisters (2022)
2. The Bookstore Wedding (2024)
3. The Bookstore Keepers (2025)
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Novels
Property Of (1977)
The Drowning Season (1979)
Angel Landing (1980)
White Horses (1982)
Fortune's Daughter (1985)
Illumination Night (1987)
At Risk (1988)
Seventh Heaven (1990)
Turtle Moon (1992)
Second Nature (1994)
Here On Earth (1997)
Local Girls (1999)
The River King (2000)
Blue Diary (2001)
The Probable Future (2003)
The Ice Queen (2005)
The Foretelling (2005)
Incantation (2006)
Skylight Confessions (2007)
The Third Angel (2008)
The Story Sisters (2009)
The Dovekeepers (2011)
The Red Garden (2011)
The Museum of Extraordinary Things (2014)
Nightbird (2015)
The Marriage of Opposites (2015)
Faithful (2016)
The World That We Knew (2019)
The Invisible Hour (2023)
When We Flew Away (2024)
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Collections
The Blackbird House (2004)
Property Of / Drowning Season / Fortune's Daughter / At Risk (2016)
Faerie Knitting (2018) (with Lisa Hoffman)
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Anthologies edited
Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops 1997 (1997)
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Series contributed to
Inheritance collection
1. Everything My Mother Taught Me (2019)
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Plays hide
Conjure (2014)
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Picture Books hide
Fireflies (1997)
Horsefly (2000)
Moondog (2003)
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Alice HoffmanBestselling Author •Novelist •Short Story Writer
Alice Hoffman
photo credit Alyssa Peek
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It was great! Alice was so lovely and warm. Our patrons loved her and asked wonderful questions. Definitely a successful event.
—Librarian, Middle Country Public Library
The event went really well – Alice was wonderful! People loved her and her remarks!
—Director of Education & Engagement, Jewish Federation of Greater Charlotte
A born storyteller.
—Entertainment Weekly
Alluring on its own, the book is also a satisfying end to a timeless saga.… Like the witches who populate her stories, Hoffman certainly knows how to enchant.
—The New York Times Book Review
With her glorious prose and extraordinary eye, Alice Hoffman seems to know what it means to be human.
—Newsday
Hoffman is a master of magical realism.
—Marie Claire
Alice Hoffman is, was, and always will be, a beautiful writer.
—The Washington Post Book World
Alice Hoffman exhibits a way with words that can leave readers breathless and turn other writers green with envy.
—The Denver Post
One of America’s most brilliant novelists.
—Library Journal
“Magic in fiction is a long tradition. One of the reasons we like fables and fairy tales is that they’re emotionally true, and page-turners at the same time.”
—Alice Hoffman
Alice Hoffman has been called “America’s literary heir to the Brothers Grimm,” and her luminous and remarkable “fables of the everyday” have enchanted readers since the publication of her first novel, Property Of, in 1977. Decades later, with numerous acclaimed and bestselling novels, as well as three short story collections and many books for young adults, Hoffman continues to seduce readers into her vividly imagined worlds.
Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Jack Sullivan says that Hoffman “has a penchant for a near-gothic strangeness and enchantment on the edges of everyday experience.” Her storytelling has the air of a fairy tale and calls to mind the writings of such magical realists as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Washington Irving.
Often drawn to the story of the outcast and the lonely oddball, Hoffman explains, “My theory is that everyone, at one time or another, has been at the fringe of society in some way: an outcast in high school, a stranger in a foreign country, the best at something, the worst at something, the one who’s different. Looking at it this way, being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.”
Hoffman is a master at forging miracles from the quotidian and the ordinary. While she explores life’s common struggles—people puzzling through essential questions about relationships and intimacy, family and identity, love and survival—she sets her tales in a world that is at once wholly recognizable and at times fantastic. Her protagonists inhabit a universe in which everyday objects—necklaces, river pebbles, birds, old overcoats, roses—become talismans that haunt and guide them as they navigate their way to a deeper understanding of themselves.
Perhaps Hoffman’s most enduring story is that of the Owens family, first introduced in the bestselling Practical Magic. “One of her most lyrical works,” (San Francisco Chronicle Book Review), it was made into a feature film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Hoffman’s latest novels have continued to deepen the saga starting with the “spellbinding” prequel (Publishers Weekly, starred review) The Rules of Magic, which kicked off Simon & Schuster’s Book Club Favorites initiative and was a selection for Reese’s Book Club. The instant New York Times bestselling Magic Lessons soon followed, tracing the roots of the Owens family back to seventeenth-century Salem. The final installment, The Book of Magic, concludes the family story, a final chapter that, according to Booklist, “brings the Owens family full circle in a tale of finely wrought female relationships, magic, and love.”
Another instant New York Times bestseller, The World That We Knew follows three young women in Berlin 1941 who must act with courage and to survive history’s darkest hour. Steeped in history and Jewish mythology, The World That We Knew is “[a] spellbinding portrait of what it means to be human in an inhuman world” (Kirkus, starred review). The book was named by O: The Oprah Magazine as one of the Best Books of fall 2019, and won both the Book Club Award from the National Jewish Council, and the 2020 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
“Alice Hoffman’s new novel will break your heart, and then stitch it back together piece by piece. It’s about love and loss, about history and the world today, about what happens when man goes against the laws of nature for good and for evil. It’s my new favorite Hoffman book—and if you know how much I adore her writing, that’s truly saying something.”
—Jodi Picoult, bestselling author of Small Great Things and My Sister’s Keeper
Some of Hoffman’s most beloved titles include Faithful, the Indie Next Pick and the Library Reads Pick for November 2016; Here On Earth, a modern reworking of Wuthering Heights that was an Oprah Book Club selection; The Marriage of Opposites, about a forbidden love affair that results in the birth of artist Camille Pissarro; and The Dovekeepers, a New York Times bestseller set in ancient Israel; and her latest novel The Invisible Hour. Hoffman’s fertile imagination extends well beyond the confines of adult literature. She has enthralled children and teens with her many young adult books, including The Green Witch, Incantation, and Nightbird. Her latest title is When We Flew Away, a novel for young readers about Anne Frank before she kept a diary. Based on extensive research and published in cooperation with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, When We Flew Away adds “new poignance to a story whose ending we already knew… [that] reminds us of how important it is to remember and honor all that was lost.” (Lois Lowry, Newbery Award-winning author of Number the Stars).
Over the course of her long career, Hoffman’s novels have been recognized as notable books of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People. Her books have been translated into more than 20 different languages, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Redbook, Architectural Digest, Gourmet, Premier, Self, and elsewhere.
In her lectures, Hoffman discusses the art of storytelling, her influences, the experience of being a writer, and the role of libraries in her life. Alice Hoffman was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island. She attended Adelphi University and received a master’s degree in creative writing from Stanford.
For more information on Alice Hoffman, please visit her on Instagram, Twitter, and at alicehoffman.com.
Download Alice Hoffman's press kit here.
Profile: Alice Hoffman
By Rahel Musleah June/July 2008
Courtesy of Deborah Feingold
Courtesy of Deborah Feingold
The magical and the everyday collide in beautiful ways in the prodigious fiction penned by this popular American Jewish writer.
In Alice Hoffman’s literary wonderland, past and present collide; magical landscapes brim with angels and humans; blackbirds turn white and pearls turn black; and love, loss and hope intermingle. In real life, Hoffman finds her personal wonderland simply—by writing stories and conjuring up characters that offer her transformative healing and emotional truth. “Books,” she says, “may well be the only true magic.”
After 19 novels, 2 short-story collections and 8 books for children and young adults, Hoffman’s prose continues to enchant readers. Many of her books have been best sellers, translated into more than 20 languages. Here on Earth (Berkley) was an Oprah Book Club selection; Practical Magic (Berkley) and Aquamarine (Scholastic) were made into movies; At Risk (Berkley) is on many high school and college reading lists. Hoffman is also a screenwriter and the author of the screenplay for the film Independence Day. Her newest novel, The Third Angel (Crown), was released in April.
Despite the fact that she wrote her first book, Property Of(Berkley), when she was only 21, it has taken Hoffman years to feel comfortable identifying publicly as a writer. “I used to tell people I was a typist,” she recalls.
Today, readers can visit her Web site (www.alicehoffman.com) and MySpace page, where she gives her age as 99 (she is 56) but otherwise honestly divulges her favorite writers (Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Emily Brontë, Edward Eager); her favorite way to develop a character (list everything about them) and the people she would like to meet (Rod Serling, John Lennon, Jesus, Virginia Woolf, Brontë, Ernest Hemingway, Elvis Presley and Harry Houdini). “Wouldn’t it be a great dinner party?” she comments.
Many readers—and other authors—rank her among their preferred writers. Best-selling novelist Jodi Picoult puts Hoffman at the top of her list of favorite authors and calls The Third Angel “gorgeous” on her Web site.
Hoffman’s New York apartment—she also has a home in Boston—is packed up for a move to another space nearby, leaving it mostly empty but for the furniture and a few works of art still on the walls. All she can offer a visitor, she says, is water and Altoids. She doesn’t flinch when asked some of the questions on her own character-development list. Favorite food? “Pizza,” she whispers guiltily, admitting she is trying to cut carbs. Hobbies? She points to a bag of yarn and knitting needles on the sofa. What’s in her closet? “Mostly black.” In fact, she wears black jeans, a black sweater, black ankle-length Arche boots and black-frame glasses. Dark hair surrounds her face.
“I’d make a terrible character,” she says, “because I’m extremely changeable. I used to change the color of my office according to the color of the book I was writing.” For Here on Earth, which she calls an autumn book, “I painted my office pumpkin with green woodwork and covered the windows with leaves made out of wax paper, so it felt like I was in the book. I kind of become whatever character I’m working on.”
She writes the kind of books she enjoys reading. She cried a lot while writing The Third Angel, the story of three women—Maddy, Frieda and Lucy—who are attracted to the “wrong” men and who finally learn to understand the power of love to mislead and redeem.
The action is set in London in 1999, 1966 and 1952. Frieda’s father, a physician who takes his daughter on visits to patients, “believed there were three angels,” Hoffman writes. “The Angel of Life, who rode along with them most nights. The Angel of Death, who appeared wearing his funeral clothes on those visits where there was no hope. And then there was the Third Angel. The one who walked among us, who sometimes lay sick in bed, begging for human compassion.”
Angels recur in many of her novels and seem to hover over her real life; her Polish sheepdog is even named Angel. There’s a plane of existence, she says, beyond what we see.
The Diary of Anne Frank figures prominently in young Lucy’s life. Hoffman tears up when she talks about Frank’s influence on her own development—“It’s the idea of what could have been,” she says. Because Hoffman’s parents divorced when she was 8, that sense of the other life she could have had weighs heavily in her imagination. Her mother, Sherry, a social worker who died nine years ago, raised Hoffman and her brother, Ross, a meteorologist, as a single parent in Franklin Square, Long Island, at a time when divorce was uncommon; her father was “not in the picture.”
Hoffman’s literary world is not overtly Jewish. Only some of her characters have Jewish names—Naomi Shapiro from Great Neck (Blackbird House; Ballantine) or Lucy Rosen (Turtle Moon; Berkley), for example—and only sporadically does she write an obviously “Jewish” story, such as Incantation (a young-adult novel about the Spanish Inquisition; Little, Brown) or “The Conjurer’s Handbook,” a chapter from Blackbird House, a kind of Holocaust fairy tale. But being Jewish informs everything she does. She came back to Judaism through her two sons—Jake, 24, and Wolfe, 18—who decided on their own to have bar mitzvas as a way to honor the memory of an aunt who was actively Jewish. They have both been to Israel numerous times.
Hoffman is married to Tom Martin, an investor and former teacher and screenwriter with whom she has collaborated on many screenplays and who is not Jewish. She also cowrote a picture book with Wolfe called Moondog (Scholastic) about a “werepup” named Angel whose sweet demeanor turns destructive when the moon is full.
Appalled that her children learned little about the Holocaust in high school and nothing at all about the Inquisition, and frightened by Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, Hoffman crafted Incantationas an answer to her feeling that Jewish history is easily rewritten by others. The book follows the story of Estrella and her family and captures a commitment to Jewish identity amid anti-Semitism. In response to her grandmother, who calls this world “a hole of darkness, of black light and evil and loss,” Estrella counters: “I told my grandmother she was wrong. We had to survive to remember. Otherwise everything we were would disappear. Those people we loved would fade as though we’d never loved them, as if they’d never walked and talked and burned. Forgetting them was the real evil. That was the hole of darkness.”
Much of Hoffman’s Jewish perspective finds its voice in Incantation. “I am very comfortable being Jewish—that’s who I am—but I’m also very paranoid,” she explains. “I have the sense that you always have to be ready to leave, and the things that are important you have to be able to carry with you both emotionally and materially. Politics is an ever-changing situation, and Jews are outsiders.”
Jews and women have both been persecuted as outsiders, she adds. Her mysteriously powerful female characters can be so threatening to society that they are often labeled witches. “Strong women are part of Jewish tradition,” she says. “My grandmother and mother worked to support their families. They made the decisions.”
Her relationship with her Russian-born grandmother, Lillie, had a “huge impact” on her. Though Lillie was not religious, she was “very Jewish” and would tell “personal folktales about villages in a frozen world where men would disappear for the whole winter to go logging. It was such a fairy-tale world compared to suburban Long Island,” says Hoffman, who has replicated the mother-daughter-grandmother triad in many of her books.
Mothers who die, especially of cancer, haunt much of Hoffman’s recent work. It’s no wonder: She, her mother and sister-in-law all had breast cancer at the same time 10 years ago. Her grandmother, who lived to 82, also had breast cancer, and another sister-in-law died of a brain tumor. A Hadassah member, Hoffman’s fight against breast cancer—with its high occurrence rate among Jewish women—has deepened her involvement in Jewish issues. She donated the advance from one of her books to found The Hoffman Breast Cancer Center at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts; helped create the Breast Cancer Hotline at her alma mater, Adelphi University in Garden City, New York; and is a member of the National Honorary Board of The Wellness Community.
The fairy-tale, folktale quality of her writing is in the tradition of Franz Kafka, I.B. Singer and Jewish mystics. As a child, Hoffman loved fairy tales peopled with characters who traveled through deep woods to reach their heart’s desire on “journeys not only of geography but also of the soul,” she says. Hoffman turns those stories on their heads: In Skylight Confessions (Back Bay), an architecturally wondrous house called the Glass Slipper is far from a Cinderella-like dream come true, haunted instead by a fragile and broken family.
Each of her books is part of the same story, she says, and though bits of her show up in all her characters, “they’re so much better than I am,” Hoffman says. “They’re so much more willing to forgive…. In my real life I’m extremely practical and rational.”
Her learning curve is truly a reader’s delight.
“I devour anything Alice gives me instantly,” says Elaine Markson, Hoffman’s literary agent since her first novel was published in 1977. “She’s warm, loving, funny and curious. She writes about people you might know and their relationships.”
Long-time friend, writer and physician Perri Klass says that Hoffman is connected to many writers with whom she is generous and supportive, recalling that “at moments I was feeling low about my writing, she’s been incredibly encouraging.” Hoffman’s voice is so distinct that “if you gave me a paragraph she wrote and didn’t tell me who wrote it, I’d probably recognize it as hers,” says Dr. Klass, noting that Hoffman can “locate what is remarkable and uncanny in the familiar.”
Though she was an avid reader and a “secret writer” growing up, Hoffman had little ambition. She was a Hebrew school dropout, wanted to quit high school, never took the SATs or considered college and thought she might cut hair for a living. Her first job, at age 17, at a Doubleday Books factory lasted one morning. After a series of other jobs, she enrolled in night school at Adelphi and, upon graduation, attended the Stanford University Creative Writing Center in Palo Alto, California, on a Mirrellees Fellowship. Her mentor, professor and writer Albert J. Guerard, and his wife, Maclin Bocock Guerard, helped her publish her first short story in Fictionmagazine. Editor Ted Solotaroff then contacted her to ask if she had a novel; she quickly wrote what was to become Property Of.In thanks to her alma mater, she helped fund the Alice Hoffman Young Writers Program for High School Students and the master of fine arts program at Adelphi.
“The good thing about being a girl in the 1950s and ’60s from a working-class family is that there weren’t as many expectations of me,” says Hoffman. “I had the freedom to do something I could fail at—to be a writer.”
But she never has failed, and it is through her storytelling that Hoffman uses narrative to survive, to heal and to remember.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the American labor and oral historian, see Alice M. Hoffman.
Alice Hoffman
Hoffman in 2019
Hoffman in 2019
Born March 16, 1952 (age 72)
New York City, U.S.
Occupation
Novelistyoung-adult writerchildren's writer
Education Valley Stream North High School
Adelphi University (BA)
Stanford University (MA)
Period 1977–present
Genre Magic realism, fantasy, historical fiction
Website
alicehoffman.com
Alice Hoffman (born March 16, 1952) is an American novelist and young-adult and children's writer, best known for her 1995 novel Practical Magic, which was adapted for a 1998 film of the same name. Many of her works fall into the genre of magic realism and contain elements of magic, irony, and non-standard romances and relationships.
Early life and education
Alice Hoffman was born in New York City and raised on Long Island, New York. Her grandmother was a Russian-Jewish immigrant.[1][2] She graduated from Valley Stream North High School[3] in 1969, and then from Adelphi University with a Bachelor of Arts. She was a Mirrielees Fellow at the Stanford University Creative Writing Center in 1973 and 1974, where she earned a Master of Arts in Creative Writing.[4]
Career
When Hoffman was twenty-one and studying at Stanford, her first short story, "At the Drive-In", was published in Volume 3 of the literary magazine Fiction.[5] Editor Ted Solotaroff contacted her, and asked whether she had a novel. At that point, she began writing her first novel, Property Of. It was published in 1977, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, now a division of Macmillan Publishers. A section of Property Of was published in Solotaroff's literary magazine, American Review.
Hoffman's first job was at Doubleday, which later published two of her novels.
She was the recipient of a New Jersey Notable Book Award for Ice Queen.[6] She won a Hammett Prize for Turtle Moon.[7] She wrote the screenplay for the 1983 film Independence Day, starring Kathleen Quinlan and Dianne Wiest.
In September 2019 Hoffman released The World That We Knew based on a true story told to her by a fan at a book signing. The woman confided to Hoffman that during World War 2, her Jewish parents had her live with non-Jewish people to escape the Nazis. These were known as "hidden children" and Hoffman thought about this woman and her unusual upbringing for years before deciding to travel to Europe and learn more.[8]
The third novel in her "Practical Magic" series, Magic Lessons, was released in October 2020. This prequel takes place in the 17th century and explores the life of Maria Owens, the family matriarch.[9][10]
For Scholastic Press, Hoffman has also written the young adult novels Indigo, Green Angel, and its sequel, Green Witch. With her son Wolfe Martin, she wrote the picture book Moondog.[11]
In 2015, Hoffman donated her archives to her alma mater, Adelphi University.[12]
Personal life
Hoffman resides in Boston. After being treated for breast cancer at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, she helped establish the hospital's Hoffman Breast Center.[13][14]
Bibliography
Novels
Property Of (1977)
The Drowning Season (1979)
Angel Landing (1980)
White Horses (1982)
Fortune's Daughter (1985)
Illumination Night (1987)
At Risk (1988)
Seventh Heaven (1990)
Turtle Moon (1992)
Second Nature (1994)
Practical Magic (1995)
Here on Earth (1997)
Local Girls (1999)
The River King (2000)
Blue Diary (2001)
The Probable Future (2003)
Blackbird House (2004)
The Ice Queen (2005)
Skylight Confessions (2007)
The Third Angel (2008)
The Story Sisters (2009)
The Red Garden (2011)
The Dovekeepers (2011)
The Museum of Extraordinary Things (2014)
The Marriage of Opposites (2015)
Faithful (2016)
The Rules of Magic (2017) – prequel to Practical Magic
The World That We Knew (2019)
Magic Lessons (2020) - prequel to Practical Magic
The Book of Magic (2021) - sequel to Practical Magic
The Invisible Hour (2023)
When We Flew Away (2024)[15][16]
Young adult novels
Aquamarine (2001)
Indigo (2002)
Green Angel (2003)
Water Tales: Aquamarine & Indigo (omnibus edition) (2003)
The Foretelling (2005)
Incantation (2006)
Green Witch (sequel to Green Angel) (2010)
Green Heart (omnibus of Green Angel & Green Witch) (2012)
Middle grade books
Nightbird (2015)
Children's books
Fireflies: A Winter's Tale (illustrated by Wayne McLoughlin) (1999)
Horsefly (paintings by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher) (2000)
Moondog (with Wolfe Martin; illustrated by Yumi Heo) (2004)
Short stories
Conjure (2014)
Nonfiction
Survival Lessons (2013)
Filmography
Independence Day (1983) (writer)
Practical Magic (1998) (novel)
Sudbury (2004) (novel)
The River King (2005) (novel)
Aquamarine (2006) (novel)
The Dovekeepers (2014) (novel)
Children's Bookshelf Talks with Alice Hoffman
By Jennifer M. Brown | Nov 30, 2006
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Alice Hoffman talked with Bookshelf about her most recent young adult novel, Incantation (Little, Brown). Set during the Spanish Inquisition, the book is narrated by 16-year-old Estrella, who must come to terms with her family’s secret identity and her place within it.
What was your inspiration for Incantation?
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I have always been interested in the Marranos, the hidden Jews, and what a terrible choice that was to make. So many looked down on them for selling out. The [Marranos] pay such a huge price for their decision. Whatever you decide in a circumstance like that, it’s a no-win situation.
I’ve always felt, as a Jew, that your identity really is hidden and secret much of the time. I was very interested in all of those things. And I realized I knew nothing about the Spanish Inquisition, and my kids knew nothing about it. It had been in none of our history classes, and I wondered, is that what will happen with the Holocaust, as well, that we’ll forget what it was like?
I started to feel that this is really important, especially given what’s going on in the Middle East, and that I needed to try to understand what was going on then.
How did you decide that the subject was best suited to a YA novel rather than a book for adults?
I think for a couple of reasons. One because I’m not a historian and couldn’t write a huge detailed novel. I thought the way to write about [the Inquisition] was in an emotional story. What I really wanted to get at were the core feelings of the people involved. The main character is learning about it just as I was learning about it. I wanted to write for someone who comes to this knowing nothing about the time period or the situation.
It’s strange how some things have come to me as teen novels—the books that are the most emotionally raw, like Green Angel, which is about 9/11, and The Foreshadowing, about the involvement in war. Whenever I’ve had these big questions for myself, they’ve come as teen novels.
These teen novels are brutally emotional, and I think that teen readers understand this state. Adults are more analytical and perhaps removed from that emotional state.
Why write this book now?
For me, it’s directly related to what’s happening in the Middle East, to the position of Jews in the world, to this sense, really, [of what] Mel Gibson said: “The Jews are at the bottom of every war.” It’s a sentiment that [is not his] alone.
When I read about the history of Spain, [I saw] that there was a time when this wasn’t true, when Muslims were in control and Jews had rights. It seems to me I was trying to explain for myself what’s being played out in the Middle East.
[Also]
I was on a book tour and I was staying at this—what I thought of as—haunted hotel in Miami. I did a reading and when I went back, the cab driver said, out of the blue, “There was a synagogue in Cuba, and when Castro came, the head rabbi put a spell on the door, so he couldn’t get past the doors.” I know now that Castro is said to be on a list of possible Marranos, that his mother was allegedly Jewish. I thought, “This is a strange story that the cab driver is telling me,” and I thought, “I’m meant to write this book.”
It was interesting to me, too, because of how religion and magic are so intertwined for a lot of people. Spain was the one European country where there was no witch hunt. In [Incantation], the focus is on Kabbalah, which is a philosophy and study, not magic. But the whole idea [in Spain at that time] of books being equated as the dangerous spark—it’s always the burning of books that are at the center.
Someone pointed out to me that the Jewish religion is the one religion where, in order to become a man, one must be able to read. That’s really part of the legacy and the tradition. And now in the Muslim countries, women are not allowed to learn or be educated. It’s just so sad that that keeps happening again and again.
Do you think the themes of the Spanish Inquisition have resonance today?
Yes, I think hugely. So many barbarous things are done in the name of religion that have nothing to do with religion but have more to do with fear and greed. It seems that we’re in the midst of something that feels very similar to me. Religion is like a powder keg right now.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Interview with Alice Hoffman
Alice Hoffman is one of the best-loved and respected writers working today. She wrote her first novel, Property Of , when she was twenty-one and she hasn't stopped since. She often writes about strong magical women and places and people you want to know—or people you feel like you already know. Her stories are mythic, filled with tragedy, love, and joy. Publishers Weekly called her latest novel, The Third Angel, "elegant and stunning." I admire Alice's writing so much. Her storytelling ability is stunning. That is a perfect word to describe her work. The word "stun" is an Old French shortening of "astonish." Alice's work is astonishing and exquisitely beautiful. I was nervous when I prepared these questions, so I asked too many of them. And yet Alice graciously answered them all. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did.
Kim Antieau (KA): Have you read anything lately that you really liked?
Alice Hoffman (AH): I don't really like to read when I'm writing—I'm afraid of getting someone else's rhythm in my head—and I just finished a book last week then hopped on a plane—so not much time yet to read. Actually, I took The Witch of Portobello with me. Going to the beach to read it as soon as I can.
KA: I’d like to start at the beginning—the beginnings of your stories. Could you tell us how your stories begin and then evolve? What starts the process: a smell, sound, character, feeling, vision? After this beginning, do you keep going? Or do you let the idea, character (whichever) ferment for a while? Or does it consume you once it has begun, like a new love?
AH: This is a difficult question. I'm not sure of the answer. I think I fear that if I ever figure out how I do it, I'll lose the ability. I think that's why so many academics find they can't write fiction—they are so busy deconstructing they can't just let go. I do everything everyone else does—outlines, notes, notebooks, charts, drafts that don't work—but really I don't know how it happens. That's why I keep doing it I assume. Like love, it makes no sense. And very consuming.
KA: I’m always fascinated by how writers physically write. What time of day or night. At a desk, on the couch, out on the beach. With a cup of coffee, tea, chocolate? With a pen and paper, computer, tape recorder? Do you write every day? Or do you take off weeks or months at a time?
AH: When I had small children I was very scheduled—up at five, etc etc. Every day so many hours or pages. Also when I was beginning and had other jobs. Now, my kids are gone, and my work and life are blended together. I write all the time on and off on a portable computer. No office anymore. I feel trapped in a room.
KA: I love reading your stories, in part, because it feels as though I am reading fairy tales or myths, as though they are all stories that have been around for a long while, and you are just kindly telling them to us again, to remind us of what we already know. Like many fairy tales, your stories often begin with catastrophe. Terrible things happen to your characters and to the people around them. Is it difficult to be a witness to these tragedies, as the writer? Is this emotionally draining for you as you are writing it? Or is it cathartic? Or neither?
AH: It's cathartic to take straw and make it into gold, or as close to gold as you can get it. Also to transfigure reality and expand it. Terrible things happen in all fairy tales -- why not? They are the most honest of all literature.
KA: Do you do a lot of research before you write a novel? (I’m thinking of Incantation, for one.)
AH: I do the research after usually—so I don't get caught up in the "facts"—with Incantation though I had been reading about Marranos (hidden Jews) for some time and had been interested and reading about Kabbalah for some time. I had a historian read the ms, but it's really more of an emotional journey than a historical one.
KA: You were a successful writer quite young, and you’ve continued to publish. Publishing has changed so much, especially in the last ten years. It used to be that authors were allowed time to build an audience. Now books are expected to have big openings like movies and are considered failures when they don’t. Has that trend affected your career at all? Do you have any feelings about this trend?
AH: I feel sad about the trend. First time authors are made too much of, then when their second book doesn't live up to the first, they're crushed and the industry looks for someone new. So many writers with two or three books can't find a publisher if they haven't sold X amount of copies. It's not a good situation, but it's a trend far beyond publishing.
KA: I often write about my struggles with illness, depression, and anxiety. I know that you’ve struggled with some of these issues, too. I read that you were able to write when you were getting treatment for breast cancer. Do you think this helped your healing process? Can you write most of the time or are there times when you can’t? When (or if) you can’t write, do you find reading is healing?
AH: I find reading very healing, but for me writing is more so. I can disappear. That's often what I'm aiming to do.
KA: Your women are most often very connected to place. They know the plant medicines, the stories, the magic of their environment. Are you connected to your place, your environment? Are you able to sniff out the stories and magic of a new place right away?
AH: Place matters to me. Invented place matters more.
KA: I have just read two of your young adult novels, Green Angel and Incantation. They are both so beautiful. When I finished Incantations, I sat on my couch and cried. I have recently started writing YA novels, and I love it. I feel freer, somehow, when writing them. Do you find the process of writing young adult and adult novels different? Do you prefer one over the other?
AH: Thank you! I think I allow myself to me more emotional when writing for teens—getting to the most raw of emotions. I just prefer to write—I think adults read teen books and teens read adult books and there's not much of a difference.
KA: What do you think of Muriel Rukeyser’s often-quoted line, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”
AH: Hah! Good line. I love it.
KA: I saw that Emily Bronte is a writer who has influenced you. Since you didn’t mention Charlotte Bronte, I’m assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that you prefer Wuthering Heights to Jane Eyre. Can you tell us what you like about one or the other?
AH: You can tell a lot about a person by which one she or he prefers. That's all I'll say!!! I am a Wuthering Heights reader all the way.
KA: I won’t ask you which of your novels is your favorite—since that’s almost like asking a parent which of her children is her favorite—but I wonder if there is a novel you love that you wish more people would notice and read?
AH: Seventh Heaven. An homage to my mother set in the suburbs in 1959.
KA: Do you want to tell us anything about your new novel The Third Angel?
AH: My new book is about love and loss—set in London in the 50s, 60s, and 90s. I have a character named Lucy Green and she just stepped in and I followed her. This novel is filled with secrets, some I didn't realize until I was done writing it.
KA: Do you want to talk about your work with the Adelphi Young Writers?
AH: It's a great program for teen writers—there should be more programs like it. There doesn't seem to be time to include writing in the high school curriculum anymore. We'll just have to take to the streets.
KA: Thank you so much for your time, Alice, and good luck with The Third Angel.
Books
Interview: Alice Hoffman
How ancient voices moved a modern writer
Simon Round
BY Simon Round
November 30, 2011 10:54
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When journalists interview novelists, they invariably ask where the idea for a story came from. Almost as invariably, this is the question that novelists dislike most.
American novelist Alice Hoffman is no exception. She talks of how stories "come to me" - and insists that her novels tend to write themselves. However, in the case of her new book, The Dovekeepers, the moment of genesis is clear. It came during her first visit to the ruins at Masada. While touring the site and the museum at Herod's fort, the site of the mass suicide of Jewish fighters making their final stand against the Romans, her emotions took her by surprise.
"I felt very affected by the place - intensely so. When I returned home, I read the historian Josephus's account. I didn't know there were survivors at Masada. As soon as I realised there were survivors, I decided to write the novel."
The book, five years in the making, has been praised by, among others, fellow writer Toni Morrison. It is written through the voices of four women who all made the journey to Masada. The fact that there were women there at all was a surprise to Hoffman. "When I was at the museum and saw artefacts that belonged to these women, I saw there was a tale which hadn't been told. I felt in a strange way like it could have been my grandmother's story. It came very naturally to me."
Researching this period was a difficult task because of the paucity of information available. Hoffman had to rely on Josephus, a notoriously unreliable source, but the only surviving account of the episode.
She also used the results of the excavations carried out by Israeli archaeologist Yigal Yadin. While she was able to form a firm impression of the episode, the history left many gaps. "It was very difficult because there's almost nothing about women in the ancient world. In the end, I gathered as much material as I could and imagined the rest."
She cannot recall how the idea for multiple female voices came to her but says she had a sense that this would be an appropriate way to tell the story. "I just let their voices come through me. I was trying to make it seem both ancient and modern at the same time."
The story resonates with Hoffman - whose 28 works of fiction include Practical Magic, which was made into a film with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock - for the same reason that it has become so important in Jewish history: "It's a story about the ultimate act of courage, and also the ultimate act of faith. The other thing that resonates is that of being a survivor.
"This is a story in one way peculiar to Jews but I also feel that it's the story of every nation that has been torn apart by war."
'The Dovekeepers' is published by Simon and Schuster at £16.99
A Q&A with Alice Hoffman
By Liz Michalski | March 29, 2013 | 16 Comments
photo credit: Deborah Feingold
Best-selling author Alice Hoffman published her first novel at the age of twenty-one, and has since written over 30 books, several of which have been turned into movies. Her most recent story, The Dovekeepers, has been called a masterpiece. Set in ancient Israel and based on the siege of the Masada, it took her over five years to write. The story, which follows four women’s lives during the time of the siege, is both intensely personal and grand in scope. It’s the story of four fierce and complicated women whose lives merge during the final days of the siege. Here’s what’s been said about it:
Beautiful, harrowing, a major contribution to twenty-first century literature.” —Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate in Literature
In her remarkable new novel, Alice Hoffman holds a mirror to our ancient past as she explores the contemporary themes of sexual desire, women’s solidarity in the face of strife, and the magic that’s quietly present in our day-to-day living. Put The Dovekeepers at the pinnacle of Hoffman’s extraordinary body of work. I was blown away.” —Wally Lamb, author of The Hour I First Believed
Hoffman makes ancient history live and breathe in this compelling story… This is both a feminist manifesto and a deeply felt tribute to courageous men and women of faith, told with the cadence and imagery of a biblical passage.” —Booklist
As a reader, I’ve loved Alice Hoffman since my twenties, when a librarian handed me a copy of Illumination Night. Finding everyday magic in a book for adults was a delight for someone who had spent her childhood reading sagas like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Dark is Rising.
As an author, I love how she handles character development and voice. I’ve pored over her novels Practical Magic and Turtle Moon time and time again, trying to learn exactly how to make that seamless transition from one point of view to the next.
So I’m thrilled that Alice took time out of her busy schedule to talk with us here. Enjoy!
Interview with Alice Hoffman
Q: Your stories often contain truly horrific events — murder, terrible freak accidents, abuse — and yet your writing is so lovely that often, when I go to reread one of your novels, it’s not what I recall at all. Your characters and settings have stayed with me but the main event has faded and I’m shocked all over again. Would you talk a bit about how you balance that driving plot event with character development and voice?
AH: I think all of my work is character-driven, and I am a huge fan of ‘plot’ — in that there is a story to follow, a reason to turn the page. But if I had to say what I think is most important for a writer, I would have to say Voice. My mentor, Albert Guerard, the greatest writing teacher of the 20th century, believed that every writer had a voice that was like a fingerprint — one of a kind — and that in order to become a writer one must find his or her voice.
Q: I’ve seen your work described as fairytales for grown-ups –an echo of a story we’ve all been told and have forgotten. Yet the magic is so subtle — often just a line or two (toads that crave Snickers Bars, for example). What draws you toward writing these types of stories, and how do you balance the magic with the real world elements, such as the very real settings in Blackbird House and The Dove Keepers?
AH: I love the idea of fairytales for grown-ups! I never think about the magic in my work — it just appears. I grew up reading fairytales, and I thought as a child, and still think, they are the most psychologically astute tales — they get to the heart and soul of the matter in a subtle way, disguised the way the truth is disguised in a dream.
Q: When I heard you speak at Grub Street (a Boston-based writing organization), you mentioned that you are a heavy rewriter. Would you talk about your process for rewriting? Any tips you can pass along to the rest of us to make the process easier?
AH: For me, the first draft is best if I can write without “thinking” — even if the story is plotted out and there’s an outline. I rewrite the entire manuscript several times, then go through it in pieces. I always find if you read fiction out loud you know what you have to change by what you stumble over.
Q: Do you write from an outline, or are you a so-called ‘panster?’
AH: Always an outline– and various crazy notes that no one else would understand. And sometimes it all gets thrown away. But it’s easier for me if I have a blueprint to begin with. Then the characters may start to do as they please.
Q: Talk a little about sisters — there’s often such a strong conflict or relationship between siblings, particularly sisters, in your stories. What draws you toward these relationships?
AH: Some people write what they know, other people write to escape their own lives and experience others. I didn’t have sisters or daughters, and this was a great loss for me, so I write about what I missed out on.
Q: Please talk a little about voice and point of view. You are a master of switching both — in Practical Magic, for example, you even jump from one person’s head to another on a single page — and yet your writing is so seamless to read the jump is never jarring. Any tips you can share on how you accomplish this?
AH: Point of view is tricky. I’m not sure how it’s done — it’s still a mystery to me. I have switched the point of view when writing a book, from first person to third, and I think it simply has to “feel right”. My one regret is that an editor talked me out of writing a section of a book from the POV of a dog — I always regretted not going with it!
Readers, you can read more of Liz’s interview with Alice Hoffman in WU’s newsletter, Writer Inboxed. To sign up, click here.
You can learn more about Alice and The Dovekeepers on her website and by following her on Facebook. Write on!
INTERVIEW WITH ALICE HOFFMAN
October 2, 2021
GENERAL QUESTIONS
How do you begin writing a new book?
I usually begin a new book by researching, if it is a historical novel, and writing an outline, even if I don’t stay true to that initial outline.
What was your favorite childhood book?
My favorite childhood book was Half Magic by Edward Eager. I loved all of his books where magic happened in ordinary life.
Do you listen to music while you write, or do you need complete silence?
I always listen to music when I write. I have a specific voice I listen to for each book. While writing my last book I listened to Taylor Swift’s Folklore.
Do you think being a writer isolates you or connects you to other people?
I actually think it does both. Writers spend so much time alone, but we also have a special connection with our readers.
What advice would you give to a new writer?
I think the most important thing is to write every day. The more you write, the more you want to write.
ALICE SPECIFIC QUESTIONS
What do libraries mean to you?
Libraries opened the door to the rest of my life when I was a girl. It was the first place Where I could make my own choices when I picked the books I wanted to read.
If you could become one of the Owens women who would you be?
Even though I think I’m most like Franny I would want to be Gillian, Sally’s wild sister.
What was the question you asked before writing The Book of Magic, and did you find your answer?
I wanted to know if it was possible to break a family curse and to live your life without the burden of your family history.
What do you hope readers will take away from the Owens family?
That love is the best sort of magic.
Having been a part of the Owens family for the past 26 years how are you feeling now that you’ve finished The Book of Magic?
I felt sad to say goodbye to them, but so fortunate to have spent so much time with the Owens family in their world of love and magic.
Interview
Alice Hoffman: ‘For me, reading and magic always went together’
This article is more than 9 years old
Anita Sethi
The author of Practical Magic and other acclaimed novels discusses her interest in escapism and her book about the mother of the painter Camille Pissarro
Sun 23 Aug 2015 02.00 EDT
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Alice Hoffman is the author of 30 acclaimed works of fiction including Practical Magic, The Dovekeepers and The Museum of Extraordinary Things. Her new novel, The Marriage of Opposites, is set in the 1800s in Paris and on the tropical island of St Thomas and tells the story of the rebellious Rachel, and how her son, Camille Pissarro, became a great artist. Hoffman was born in New York and now lives near Boston.
It’s clear that you wanted to get into the mindset of what it was like to be a woman in the 1800s.
I really did. When I first read Wuthering Heights I didn’t understand why Cathy couldn’t marry the person she loved. I didn’t understand the property laws, and the constraints on women. Even though laws have changed we still have so many social constraints and so many rules that we set for ourselves and that society sets for us. It’s very difficult still to be a woman.
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Whether characters conform or break the rules shapes the plot of the book…
What interested me most about Rachel is that she was such a rebel, she was willing to break the rules, no matter the price. She’s the woman I wish I was – I wish I had her courage and bravery.
Do you set yourself rules in your writing life?
I don’t think about rules when I’m writing – that’s the great thing about writing: it’s the one place in my life that I can do whatever I want.
Class and racial conflict are compelling themes…
Yes – I wanted to explore how class and race and religion are human constructs that don’t really exist when we take them away.
What was your motivation in fictionalising the life of an artist?
I’m very interested in what conditions make a great artist – how did Camille Pissarro become the father of impressionism? I wanted to get inside his head and the head of his mother. Because Rachel was an outcast and outsider, what else could she expect her son to be? He grew up to be an anarchist and atheist and very much on the side of the working man and woman. I didn’t want it to feel like a history book, though, I wanted it to feel alive.
Like much of your work, the novel is wonderfully rich in magic, folklore and fairy tale. Why is that?
For me, reading and magic always went together. In childhood I was reading all the time; I was very much an escapist reader, in that reading saved my life. I started reading folklore and fairytales and heard stories from my Russian grandmother. Those are the original stories, this oral tradition. I read a lot of magic. My favourite writer was Edward Eager – he was a huge fan of E Nesbit and wrote his own magical books. For me, literature and magic have always gone together in terms of subject matter but also in what literature does to a reader – it casts a magic spell.
What kind of stories did your grandmother tell you?
When she talked about her life it seemed like a fairytale to me: she came from Russia, from a place where the river was frozen all year round and men went down it on rafts and got stuck in the ice and couldn’t come back. If you don’t write them down, stories can get lost and there’s no one left to tell them.
Where does your interest in the theme of survival come from?
I’m a breast cancer survivor – that happened to me about 17 years ago, but even before that I’d always been interested in survivors. For me, it’s trying to learn the lessons of survivorship, because I’ve had a hard time surviving trauma, and I’m so in awe of the things that people experience and manage to survive. Rachel’s community were Jews who escaped the Inquisition, then moved from Spain to Portugal to the New World. I’m in awe of what they did in order to survive and to keep going, and to keep the faith. In a way, I feel survival is always my subject matter. Anita Sethi
The Marriage of Opposites is published by Scribner (£16.99). Click here to order a copy for £12.99
Alice Hoffman on “Nightbird” | “I Write the Book I Want to Read.”
by Jennifer M. Brown
Mar 24, 2015 | Filed in People
nightbirdIn Nightbird (Wendy Lamb/Random House, March 2015; Gr 5-8), Alice Hoffman explores the impact that keeping a secret has on 12-year-old Twig. The girl's brother, James, bears the burden of a 200-year-old curse placed on his family: all male children will be born with wings. When Twig confides in a new neighbor, tectonic shifts begin to occur in their small Massachusetts town. Here Hoffman speaks of the power of fairy tales and the desire to write for the young reader that lives within her. Nightbird shares a melding of magic and realism that's present in your books for young adults, Green Angel and Aquamarine, and your adult novels. What is it about that combination that compels you as a writer? My childhood reading was fairy tales, and even though they were magical, they felt the most real. In terms of what was happening emotionally and psychologically, even if the story was about a beast or a rose that wouldn't die, there were truths there. That the magical and the real exist side by side makes sense to me. I always think of myself as a 12-year-old reader…[and] write the book that I want to read. Where did the idea of Nightbird come from? This story is about the isolation that comes from secrets. I think many kids know about family secrets, and they know they're not supposed to discuss them. What was the inspiration of James's curse? I thought of the Minotaur—because of his birthright, he's confined to this half-man, half-creature body. It's that idea of the sins of the father visited upon the son, isn't it? The idea of a family curse, especially one that isn’t talked about, is ancient, whether from father to son or mother to daughter. It's like the secret of the nursery: you know it even when you don't know it. Also, the monster in the family is a common mythological situation. Nightbird came to me as the story of a “monster’s” sister—one who knows that her sibling is not a monster. How you appear on the outside isn't necessarily how you are inside. Kids at this age intrinsically know that. We loved the portrayal of the “Gossip Group”—the men who hang out at the general store, discussing everything and everyone. Even though they're looking to catch the mysterious nighttime monster that’s been reported around town, they're not villainous. There is the sense in small towns that everyone knows everyone, but they're not out to do anything bad; they're out to protect their neighbors. It appears that Twig's mother moved to New York to escape the fact that everyone knows everyone's business. Yes, but you carry your legacy with you. That's what happened to her. I thought of this as a mother-daughter book…. It's about understanding your parent a little bit [better]. You can never know your mother when she was younger. Twig’s mother, too, doesn't really know Twig. In the beginning of the book, Twig falls from a tree in her attempt to spy on the new neighbors—the Halls. Does the tree represent the Tree of Knowledge, in the sense that it’s the end of the girl going along as the innocent party to her mother’s secrecy? If Twig hadn't fallen—and everything it means in terms of apples and apple trees—she wouldn't have made the connections she does. They make her more human. That's what books were to me. I feel that they'll never die because as the reader you have to be the imaginer. I don't think any other art form [requires] that. Twig's friendship with Julia Hall transforms her, doesn't it, in the same way that James’s love of Agate Hall transforms him. They move from isolation to connections, from fear to faith in ways that their mother cannot. Do you think children have the power to inspire that kind of faith in their parents? I do. I think you learn a lot from your children and they take you places you wouldn't necessarily have gone. Friendships also bring you outside of your family—much like reading a book, in a way. It's an important step for Twig. You also have a conservationist theme in here. Did that evolve naturally from the plot? Or was it part of your inspiration for the book? It really did evolve. It wasn't there at the beginning. I realized a lot of what's going on in this town, is the feeling that people love it. They want to protect it, which is something they have in common. Except for an outsider [a real estate developer] who doesn't think of the place that way. You nicely thread the legend of Johnny Appleseed in there, too. Are we in danger of losing that legend? I'm a little obsessed with Johnny Appleseed. He's such an interesting character. I wrote about him once in an anthology of stories set in Massachusetts [The Red Garden]. He's the original hippie and conservationist. He was a wild, interesting character. You published your first book when you were 22. What writing advice would you give to aspiring authors? I think the most important thing is to be a reader. It's a very small step from being a reader to being a writer. You become a writer when there's a book you want to read that hasn't been written.
Alice Hoffman interview: Story magic
This best-selling author is a master of blending the real and the fantastic.
Alice Hoffman interview
Photo: Deborah Feingold
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In the interviews had with Alice Hoffman, in late June and early July, the author of 30 fictional books told me, “I always feel that fiction is the truth and nonfiction is a lie.”
I’m tempted to link this comment to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous quote on romances – that the truth they reveal is “the truth of the human heart.” Hoffman can be compared to Hawthorne, as her work is informed by magic, mystery, and suspense – where dark secrets are slowly, but inevitably, brought to the light of day, and, like Hawthorne, it isn’t the “light of common day.” Perhaps, like Hawthorne’s romances, Hoffman’s novels are best read at twilight. But for all their comparisons, Hoffman’s work is indisputably more realistic than Hawthorne’s, however much mystical forces inform it – where Hawthorne conjures magic, Hoffman dwells in magical realism.
Hoffman is probably best known for Practical Magic, which was made into a movie in 1998 that starred Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. But her work in fiction is vast, publishing in literary, children’s, and young adult markets. A number of her books are historical, delineating complex family sagas. She is a careful researcher, bringing historical people, places, and events to life – and with an impressive range of periods and places: The Dovekeepers is set 2000 years ago, in Roman times; The Marriage of Opposites, 19th-century St. Thomas and Paris; The Museum of Extraordinary Things, an early 20th-century Coney Island freak show. Her newest novel, The Rules of Magic, is a contemporary novel with roots back to Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1600s, a harrowing period in which many so-called witches were wrongfully accused by Judge John Hathorne, grandfather of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who suffered ancestral guilt over his relative’s ignoble role in these trials. The protagonists of Hoffman’s novel are indeed witches, but they’re the good kind, with definite rules to follow – the first being “do no harm,” or, in Latin, Primum non nocere. But in Hoffman’s work as a whole, spirit worlds can bring about evil just as often as good.
Hoffman’s prose style draws the reader in with her power to capture, with great force, the many sensuous details her characters experience, so that her protagonists come alive in a richly developed setting. One cannot help but savor the language. Hoffman may be best read when one is not in a hurry to move on – and yet her characters and conflicts do move us forward, so we are delighted to see her story proceeding, her plot gathering momentum like a storm. She is, after all, a master of intrigue, and we want to know which secret will be revealed next.
From a cursory look at her canon, one might get the idea that she’s focused on the novel form, but a significant portion of her work is made up of the short form as well, a form she truly appreciates. “I’m a big fan of linked short stories,” she says. “I have three books of linked short stories: Local Girls, Blackbird House, and The Red Garden. These books are the most fun I’ve ever had writing.”
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Hoffman also believes in the power and importance of writing for younger audiences. Of her YA books, Hoffman says, “What you read at the age of 12 and 13 and 14 stays with you in a very intense, deep way – that is the literature that makes you the person that you are and the writer that you are.”
Writing is a complex process for Alice Hoffman. Turning out 30 works of fiction over a long career certainly calls for a process, but it doesn’t come in one definite, prescribed approach: “My thinking about a novel always includes writing. I always write my way in. Sometimes 10 years can pass before I go back to it, and sometimes it’s the next thing I write.”
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The Alice Hoffman File:
Received a BA from Adelphi University and MA in creative writing from Stanford University.
Her debut novel, Property Of, was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux when Hoffman was 21 years old.
Published 30 works of fiction, including literary, children’s, and YA.
Her novel Here on Earth was an Oprah Book Club pick.
Wrote screenplay for Independence Day (1983).
Practical Magic was made into a movie starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman (1998).
The Dovekeepers was adapted for TV in a 2015 miniseries.
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Alice Hoffman: Interview
Magic, mystery, and secrets are clearly important in your fiction. Can you say why? Does magic serve a plot function? Do you purposely pursue subjects that involve these elements, or do they just come to you?
I don’t purposely pursue magic – it’s just part of the prose that I write. I grew up reading fairy tales and myths. For me, magic has always been a part of literature as a reader and as a writer. Magic doesn’t have so much to do with plot as it does with voice. For instance, you can tell a story in a realistic way, and if you’re Hemingway, it’s great, and it works. For me, magic is about the way the story is told rather than the story itself. It’s not a hocus-pocus influence in the plot. It’s more the tone of the story, the way the story tries to draw you in and create a fictional world. I’d like to add that I think the most important thing for beginning writers is to find their own voice.
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Can you say which fairy tales you read as a child and what you drew from them for your fiction?
For me, it’s not specific fairy tales but the whole tradition of fairy tales. I’m also really interested in women telling stories. Those stories, whether they’re myths or fairy tales, belong to the great tradition of women telling stories to their children and grandchildren. So that whole tradition of how stories are told is really interesting to me as a woman and a writer. I always loved the way that fairy tales are told in a realistic voice, a kind of blending of the real and the fantastic.
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A number of your novels are historical novels. What kinds of things do you research?
That’s really hard to say because when I do research, I’m researching every aspect, and it often depends on the book. For instance, when I did research for The Dovekeepers, there was very little, pretty much nothing, as far as research about women in the time period I was writing about, so what I did was write about nomadic people in the Middle East today. After all, the way you take care of the horses or donkeys or whatever is the same now as back then. When I was writing about Rachel in The Marriage of Opposites, I looked at a lot of books of photographs. I did a lot of research on bats and birds. I want to try to create the world. In a historical novel, you’re creating a world for your characters to inhabit. It was really nice to receive a letter from someone who grew up on St. Thomas, who said they felt like they were re-entering their childhood when they read the book – that is exactly what I would want.
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What is your research process like? Do you do all your research before writing? Or do you write as you research?
I do quite a bit of research before I start a project, then stop for a while because I have to take a step away from history and write a novel. When I’m done with a first draft, I go back again and do a great deal more research. So I think I do kind of a layered research; I keep going back and doing more and more, but I’m still focused on the fact that I’m writing a novel, not a history.
Research can be never-ending. Especially with The Dovekeepers, I realized that. That book took me five years to research and write. There was a point when I realized that I could research it for the rest of my life. I was never going to know everything about the time period. There was a point when I just decided to start writing.
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How much of the research you do gets used in a novel, how much not used?
I don’t know. I mean, definitely I know more than I put in the book to help create the characters. I don’t use the specific information. It’s probably true that 20 or 30 percent of what I research never has anything to do with the book itself, but it has to do with creating the world.
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In your current novel, The Rules of Magic, how much research did you do in terms of the history of witchcraft and magic lore?
I’ve always been interested in witchcraft, and I’ve done research my whole life. I did a bit more for The Rules of Magic because I was writing specifically about a particular judge, Judge Hathorne, at the witchcraft trials in Salem. I read whatever I could find about him, and I found him a really interesting character. As to magic, for me it’s always a pleasure to study magic and to find out more and more. Everything in the book about magic lore was something that I researched. For instance, the use of medicinal plants and herbs. Still, while the research is interesting, it’s not what’s important. Really, the most important thing is writing the novel and creating the characters. That’s the big difference between an historical novel and a history. What I’m mostly interested in is the novel part of it. All the research that I do is in service to that.
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Your characters are sympathetic, interesting, and compelling. Do you discover your characters as you write, or do you pretty much know them beforehand? What about surprises?
I think it’s really important to know your characters. I think it’s really good to make a lot of lists and tell everything about your characters: what books they read, what they’re wearing, what their relationships are like. Write down everything about them. Then you have to kind of write your way into them. My characters grow as I write them and become more themselves as they reveal their innermost spirit. That’s the way it should feel when you’re writing a novel: The characters are alive, making their own choices, and you’re just following them. When that happens, they almost always surprise us. This certainly was true in The Rules of Magic. Moreover, as the writer, I want to be surprised; I want to be drawn in. The reason that I read a novel is the same reason that I write a novel.
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How do you decide on narrative point of view? What advice do you have for beginning writers on handling omniscient POV, which you sometimes use?
I don’t really decide on the narrative point of view – the book comes with a point of view. For instance, I don’t tell myself this is going to be a first-person book or this is going to be third- person narration. I write a little bit in first person or a little bit in third person. I kind of play around with it, and then something just clicks and feels right. I think it’s always great to experiment with different points of view. For beginning writers, it’s really interesting to write fiction from varying points of view to see how that changes the mood and characters.
As to omniscient point of view, I think it’s much easier to write in first person, and I think it’s also more fun to write in first person, but sometimes you just can’t tell the whole story from the first-person POV. It’s fine if you’re writing The Catcher in the Rye, but in other cases, it can be limiting.
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In drafting a novel, how do you begin? Can you describe your process of getting into your story?
I begin by writing various notes, by creating the characters, usually by making lists so that I know everything about them and the material that I’m not going to use. I do a lot of research about place and the physical and natural environment of the setting. And then I make an outline. That outline changes in writing, but it gives me a place to begin. A novel comes into being because you write it. You can do all the planning things, the outlines, and I believe in all that, but basically a book comes from writing your way into it.
What about plot and theme? What about using symbols to create meaning?
I think plot is really important – it’s the thing that makes you want to turn the page. I don’t believe in theme. I believe in story but not theme. It can be destructive if you begin with a theme because you’re deciding what the story is about before you even write it. Theme applies to reading fiction, not writing it. A lot of people have a great idea, and then they don’t know why they can’t write their book.
Writers don’t decide what symbols mean. Symbols arise from the text. And then when you use them, you say, “Oh, that’s what it says. That’s what I was thinking.” Because I always feel that with writing, there is an outside story and an inside story. The outside story is what you plot and what you think the book is. As soon as you’re writing it, you discover there’s also an inside story, and it may be one that you never really thought about, and you don’t really understand it till you write it.
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Beginnings and endings of novels are tough to write. Any recommendations for early-stage writers on creating compelling openings and avoiding tidy endings?
Beginnings can change, so you just have to start and take a leap of faith. A lot of times you end up cutting the beginning. You can always go back and rewrite it. That certainly happened in The Rules of Magic. I started out with a lot more going in the beginning, and I ended up cutting half of it. It’s about hooking the reader on the first page. If you don’t draw someone in, they probably won’t read further. In your beginning, you need to start with something major or at least set the tone and the language so that the reader wants to turn the page. I think that’s the most important thing. It has to have intensity. It could be drama, it could be language, it could be many different things, but it must have intensity.
As to endings, I begin a book with the ending so that I know where I’m going even though I don’t particularly know the whole journey. Sometimes that changes, and sometimes it remains the same. The thing about endings is you have to feel that it’s over. You could write about these people forever, but there comes a point when you feel like the circle is closed. You’ve told the story. It feels right to you.
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How much revision do you do? How do you go about revising? How does the final draft compare to the first draft?
I’m a big believer in revision. You have to rewrite the entire manuscript rather than do it in bits and pieces. Often my first draft and last draft are completely different. Sometimes characters disappear and new characters appear. I make huge changes. Half the characters in the first draft of The Rules of Magic didn’t make it to the final book. In the first draft, I didn’t know what I was writing about. I had to discover this, and then I had to go back and rewrite it. The novel changed radically. I think as a writer you have to be unafraid to cut your own material and to get rid of prose you love if it doesn’t serve the novel.
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You’ve published a stack of novels. Do you ever work on more than one novel at a time? Perhaps two? Do you see any downsides to this approach?
I only work on one novel at a time, but I have notes about other novels, sometimes outlines, sometimes chapters. They’re like planes on the runway waiting to take off, but they’re not ready yet. As far as working on two novels at a time? Everybody works differently. But for me, I don’t think I could actually work on two novels on an intense level. I think it would really be easy to lose focus. It’s hard enough to focus on one novel – it’s a lot of work. I personally think working on two would kind of dilute whatever you are putting into the novel. I think it would be difficult.
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What’s a typical work day and work week like for you? What about a particular place to write?
I don’t really have a typical workday or typical work week. I do set goals, usually in terms of pages and how many pages a week or day I will do. Sometimes I fail, but at least it gives me a goal. I do think it’s important to write every day. I don’t always do it, but when I’m in the thick of writing, I do it. If you’re writing every day, it becomes a habit. It’s a practice, almost. The more you do it, the better you are at it. As to where I write, I don’t want a view. I don’t want to be someplace beautiful – I want to look at a blank wall. I’m interested in creating something, imagining something.
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Who are your favorite authors? Which authors have had the greatest influence on your writing and in what ways?
I think the greatest living novelist is Toni Morrison. I’ve been influenced by her beautiful work. I don’t think it’s influence so much as inspiration. I think that’s what happens when you find a great writer, and I think she’s a great writer. It’s inspirational more than anything else. It makes you want to write something beautiful and great yourself. That’s what happens when you fall in love with a great writer.
I’ve also been influenced by the work of writers that I read when I was young, especially Emily Brontë, Grace Paley, and the very wonderful Ray Bradbury. For me, it’s really different with Bradbury. When you read somebody at age 12 or 13, you can be influenced in a psychological way. And that’s what happened to me with Ray Bradbury. His work influenced me as a person.
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What tips do you have for early-stage writers in terms of getting their work published?
I think the more that you send your work out, the more chance you have to have it published. My advice is to read literary magazines to discover the ones that you like and the ones that you feel would be a good fit for you, and then send out your stories. I think it’s really important to read the magazine before you submit to it, even though the first magazine I ever submitted to I didn’t read.
I’m a big believer in joining groups. Writing classes, graduate programs, writers’ workshops. I think it’s good to be with other writers and to have a reason to write. I’m on the board of Boston’s GrubStreet. They have classes and workshops at every level, including this great thing called Novel Incubator, where you basically write a novel for the class, working with a mentor. It’s important, being with other writers and having a deadline and being forced to write.
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Another thing is to go to conferences. There are many conferences all over where there are agents and editors, and sometimes you can show them your work. There are summer programs as well. These are good places to meet people.
I think the most important thing is to think about the fact that writers write. And that you can’t put it off until everything is perfect because nothing ever is perfect.
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Jack Smith is author of numerous articles, reviews, and interviews, four novels, and a book on writing, entitled Write and Revise for Publication.
Alice Hoffman Talks Her Latest Novel, ‘The Invisible Hour’
The “New York Times” best-selling author on librarians, book bans, and why she’ll never tire of writing about magic.
By Sandra EbejerPublished: Aug 14, 2023
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Since Alice Hoffman’s debut novel, Property Of, was published in 1977, the beloved author has written more than 30 works of fiction, many of which contain elements of magic and fantasy. And though her latest, The Invisible Hour, is full of magic realism, time travel, and historical fiction, the author tells Shondaland it was very much inspired by the world we live in today.
“This book [was written] during Covid,” Hoffman says. “I think a lot of time-travel books were written during Covid because [there was] this impulse to get out of here [laughs].” She goes on to say, however, that the pandemic wasn’t her only inspiration. “When I was writing the book, Roe v. Wade came up. I was shocked, having been through it a long time ago, that it was all happening again. So, this book is about this young woman who gets pregnant. Her parents want to take over, and she actually wants to have the baby. She goes out to Western Massachusetts and joins this cult, and the child is raised within the cult. I feel like if she hadn’t had to make that choice, it would be a completely different story.”
When the child of the story, Mia, discovers books — which are banned in the cult — she learns they can take her to new worlds, providing an escape from the confines of the community where she lives. She falls in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and years later travels back to 1837 to meet Hawthorne himself, potentially changing the course of literary history. It is, as described by the publisher, “an enchanting story about love, heartbreak, self-discovery, and the enduring magic of books.”
From her home near Boston, Hoffman spoke with Shondaland about her love of reading, the research she did for the book, and how her mother’s work influenced this latest novel.
SANDRA EBEJER: Congratulations on your new book! Where did the idea for The Invisible Hour come from?
ALICE HOFFMAN: I’d been thinking about writing about Nathaniel Hawthorne for a long time. I lived in Concord for a while, where all the writers at the time lived — Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, the Alcotts — and I was always thinking about writing about [Hawthorne] because I think he’s such an interesting character. Also, it’s about what I felt was going on now. It’s a lot about The Scarlet Letter, and that took place during Puritan times. In my book, there’s a lot about a cult where they banned books. I felt like it was a current thing, and so important to discuss. So, that was part of it. Then it just all melded together.
SE: Touching on what you just said, the characters in the cult cannot make decisions about their own reproductive health or even read books — both of which are relevant, given what’s going on in the world today. Did you know going in that you wanted to write about these topics? Or did they come up naturally as you were writing?
AH: I went into it knowing, because The Scarlet Letter is so much about a woman that rebels against all of these puritanical rules. She has a baby by herself, she refuses to say who the father is, she lives outside of the rest of society, and she makes this choice. I was thinking about how hard choices are for women, how different it is for women than for men, because we have babies and sometimes, in certain settings, you can’t make a choice about your body or your baby. That hasn’t changed much in many ways.
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SE: In the advance copy of this book, you share that when you were 13, you often helped your mother, who was a social worker, with her work. What was that time in your life like, and what influence did it have on The Invisible Hour?
AH: My mother was an interesting person. I think she was a really good social worker. She wasn’t that great as a mother, but she was good at a lot of other things [laughs].I used to go with her [to work] when I was 12 or 13, and it was very traumatic. I mean, I’m just realizing now how traumatic it was. There was this one instance where we picked up these red-haired twins, and I thought, “Who would ever want to give up these babies?” When we were delivering them into foster care, the person there thought that they were my children, and I realized, “Oh. They could be my children. And then what would I do?” I had a lot of friends who disappeared from school because that’s what used to happen [when you were pregnant]. You just disappeared. I don’t know if they had the babies; I don’t know if they had abortions. I don’t know what they did. But my mother knew where you could get a safe abortion, so my friends would come to her. She knew of a doctor in Philadelphia, and we lived in New York. It was so traumatic for everyone who had to experience this. I was thinking about that when I was writing the book, just the idea that women so often can’t make their own decisions about their own bodies is pretty much the same in so many places.
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SE: Part II of the book takes place in 1837 and includes Nathaniel Hawthorne as a character. How much research went into this section of the book?
AH: I did a ton of research. I had a good friend, Megan Marshall, who’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. She wrote about the Peabody sisters, and Hawthorne had married one of the Peabody sisters. So, she read the book and was very helpful to me. I did a lot of research, but ultimately I wanted [the character Hawthorne] to feel like he’s a real person. It was a combination of what I researched and what I imagined.
SE: You shared on Instagram that Hawthorne is one of your favorite authors. What was it like trying to bring him to life on the page?
AH: I think I did him justice. I don’t know if he would have been happy with it because he wasn’t happy about a lot of things. But I feel like I brought him to life, at least for me.
SE: Many of your books have elements of magic and mysticism; what is it about those themes that appeals to you?
AH: Well, I really believe it’s the original literature and that realism is kind of a new thing. Magic, fairy tales, and myths have been part of literature from the beginning and grandmothers telling stories to their grandchildren. That kind of oral tradition usually included magic. I think it’s a way to get to the heart of a story and to tell a deeper truth. Those were my favorite books when I was a kid, and they’re still my favorite books now.
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SE: If you could go back in time the way Mia does, which author would you choose to spend time with?
AH: Emily Brontë. I love Wuthering Heights. To me, it’s always been so amazing that she could write this huge book and have so little experience in the world. And yet, I think it’s the most psychologically interesting novel that’s ever been written and the deepest psychological novel ever written.
The Invisible Hour: A Novel
The Invisible Hour: A Novel
$14 at Amazon
SE: There are a number of lines in the book that speak to your love of reading. At one point, you write, “In a place where books were banned there could be no personal freedom, no hope, and no dreams for the future.” You’ve written young adult and children’s books; what do you say about those who are fighting against literature, attempting to ban books or punish librarians for doing their job?
AH: Librarians mean so much to me and really changed my life. Sometimes people affect your life so strongly, and you never get to thank them. In a way, this is my way of thanking the librarians in my life and librarians all over. I think it’s amazing that people are so scared of books. They’re so frightened of anything that might open people’s minds. I mean, part of reading is to have empathy for people who are not like you. That seems to be very dangerous [right now]. When I was growing up, one of my favorite books was Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, which is about a society where books are outlawed and there are firemen who burn books. That’s their job. You really can’t have a free society if you are banning books and destroying books. I mean, the first thing they did in Nazi Germany was to burn the books.
SE: Do you write every day?
AH: It’s getting harder for me to write every day. I mean, life is just so crazily busy. And there’s so many other aspects of being a writer now. I started out writing every day, and I would get up and write at 4:45 before I went to work or school or whatever I was doing, just to get an hour or two in. But I did write every day. Not so much anymore, although I’m writing all the time, in a way.
SE: It must be so different now with social media and all the things that authors have to do to promote their books.
AH: Yeah! When I started, there was nothing like that. Even book tours, unless you were Norman Mailer or someone like that, just didn’t exist. Being a writer was very private. Now, it’s different. In some ways, I think that’s hard, because it’s hard for people to find the time to write and because they’re thinking about the outside instead of the inside of what they really want to write. But in some ways, it’s very connecting. I’ve met a lot of interesting people that I would have never met.
SE: You’ve published more than 30 books. Has your love for writing ever waned? Do you ever get writer’s block or feel like you have nothing more to say?
AH: I feel like I’m never going to have enough time to tell all the stories that I want to tell. I always feel like I’m in a rush because I’ll never be able to be finished.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
An Interview with Alice Hoffman
by Christina Thompson
In this conversation with editor Christina Thompson, award-winning novelist Alice Hoffman reflects on her writing and looks back at three stories she published in the early 2000s in Harvard Review.
Christina Thompson: I wanted to start by asking you how many books you have written.
Alice Hoffman: I don’t really know, but a lot. I’m not sure how many. I haven’t kept track. I think about thirty.
CT: One of my favorite Harvard Review contributor notes was John Updike’s. It said something like “John Updike is the author of over fifty books.”
AH: I have this impression—it’s probably wrong—that it came easily to him because his prose is so fluid. I have the sense that he just sat down and then there it was. But, you know, there are people who think that about me. It’s probably never true of anybody, but it seemed like it was true of him.
CT: It probably isn’t ever true of anybody. I tend to think that the people who get a lot done are the people who work hard.
AH: That’s my take, too. I mean, I work all the time. It’s probably not the best thing to do, but that’s what I do.
••• Read Alice Hoffman’s “Lionheart,” published in Harvard Review 25 •••
CT: We published three stories of yours in the aughts, and I think we should take them in chronological order beginning with “Lionheart.”
AH: This story is an extract from a book of linked short stories (my favorite thing to write and my favorite thing to read but not necessarily publishers’ favorite thing to publish). It was from Blackbird House (Doubleday, 2004), and all the stories took place in the same house, on a farm that I used to live on a long time ago. I loved that house so much and I just kind of imagined what the history of the house might have been.
CT: This story, which starts in 1908 and involves one of several families who appear in the book, is really kind of heartbreaking.
AH: Yes, because it’s about your love for your children and how you can’t really protect them, no matter what. The mother has several children, but one of them is the child she loves beyond measure, and she wants him to have a different life. They’re farmers, you know, the kind of people who live on a run-down farm with no heat.
CT: We don’t learn until fairly far into the story that this child has a different father from the others. I didn’t see that coming, but as soon as I learned it, it was like, Oh, of course he does. That wasn’t the only thing I didn’t see coming; the ending also took me by surprise.
AH: Yes. You think you’re guiding your children on the right path, and it’s the path that leads them to disaster, and you just never know. If you turn right, you have one life; if you turn left, you have another life. And you just don’t know which is the better turn to take. Looking back, I was kind of surprised by the sadness of these stories. Well, what do they say—you either write about joy or sorrow. There’s a lot of loss: this woman, this mother, who is a grandmother in the next story, she really knows how to love someone, and that’s not so easy in this world. There’s a sense that loss can happen to anyone, that no one is really protected, that this is what it means to be human, and this is just what it is.
CT: I think one of the things that struck me about this story is that it’s so understated. The tragedy is very matter-of-fact, the way it’s delivered—I mean, you could almost miss it. It makes the sorrow feel bigger.
AH: I have to say I really like that as a reader. I think that’s why I’m such a huge fan of Elizabeth Strout, because her stories are always a surprise. They have this emotional twist that’s so understated. You don’t even know you’re going to be walloped with emotion until you are.
••• Read Alice Hoffman’s “All That I Am and Ever Will Be,” published in Harvard Review 31 •••
CT: The second story, “All That I Am and Ever Will Be,” is a story I used to teach, and I always thought it was funny. What’s the context for this one?
AH: Shelby’s a young woman who has a tragedy that derails her life. She’s in a terrible accident and she blames herself for everything. Shelby is, weirdly enough, a voice that’s closest to my own voice, even though she’s much younger than I am. I love Shelby—in fact, I named my dog after her. She has a very complicated relationship with her parents and she has to go home due to a family crisis; it’s really about a kind of love between a mother and a daughter. But the story, which ended up as part of the novel Faithful (Simon & Schuster, 2016), is also about a person who starts to be able to feel again. I think that’s what I’m always writing about, people who can’t feel for whatever reason, who are traumatized in some way, and they have to relearn how to feel. A second chance, you know.
CT: One thing I really love about this story is the banter. I think the dialogue in this story is so funny and natural.
AH: It’s like ping, pong, boom, you know, between people who know each other really well, who have been saying these same things to each other for decades. I don’t necessarily always write that way, but I think it was right for this book. This is what these characters were like, and this is the way they talk to each other. So it’s got this feeling of banter that I don’t often have. It was fun to do.
CT: This story is quite different from the other two, partly because it’s set in the present. In the other two stories there’s more of a sense of panorama, of looking back. They’re more descriptive in in that scene-setting way—more landscape, more nature—but the strength of the characters is the same in all of them.
AH: Shelby reminds me of my original voice, you know, the closest-to-my-heart, who-I-am voice, and how I started out. But that’s why I’ve written so many books, because I don’t want to write the same thing over and over. I think I probably used to plot a lot less than I do now. I used to just let the characters walk in the door, and they just did whatever they did, and then in my revisions I would fix it up. Now I tend to have things plotted out before I start.
CT: Does it make it easier to write once you know what’s going to happen?
AH: No, I think it’s easier to let the characters just evolve the way they’re going to and then fix it later. But it may also be because I was a screenwriter for twenty-five years, and so I got into certain habits of plotting things out and having a big board and Post-It notes. I started to think in a different way, which in some ways was helpful. A lot of people who are writing a book, especially for the first time, get stuck wondering what the book is about. I find that myself. I’m like, What is this? What is this about? I always feel like there’s an outside story and there’s an inside story. The outside story you should know as a writer, but the inside story I think it’s better if you don’t know so you can discover it. An editor once said to me, Well, what is this about? And I was like, But that’s why I’m writing the book.
••• Read Alice Hoffman’s “The Year Without Summer,” published in Harvard Review 37 •••
CT: I recently pulled this issue off the shelf to show it to one of our interns and came across this story. It struck me because I had just been reading about the 1815 explosion of Mount Tambora, which I don’t think I even knew about when I first published “The Year Without Summer.” So, tell me, how did you happen to write this one?
AH: I was just kind of dipping around in history and I found out that there was a big year without a summer in New England. So then I looked it up, and there was this volcanic blast that was a hundred times as large as that of Mount St. Helens and it sent so much stuff into the atmosphere that it affected everything across the world.
CT: There was a killing frost in New England that summer and a big blizzard, which you write about in the story. This one is also a story about loss—about a family who loses a child. But it’s also a story about escape.
AH: And about falling in love.
CT: And it’s also got a kind of sneaky ending. You’re reading along, and you feel the time passing, and you gradually become aware—the way you would if you were looking for someone lost at sea, or in a snowstorm—that the person can’t have survived because too much time has elapsed. In the beginning you’re thinking (like the characters), They’re going to find her, she’s curled up in some place. And then too much time passes, and it gets dark and night comes, and the whole question of what you’re going to find isn’t the issue in the end. That’s not it; it becomes something else entirely.
AH: I don’t know If I knew that when I started writing this story. I assume that I did not. It was a story about this attempted rescue of a six-year-old who was missing in this snowstorm in the summer, and it turned out to be about something completely different.
CT: This one was also published in a collection of linked stories, The Red Garden (Crown, 2011). Is there more about these characters in the book?
AH: The little girl is a continuing character. She becomes a part of the town; she’s a ghost that people see at different times in their lives, and the townspeople put on a play every summer and the play is about an apparition. So she becomes a sort of a theme, a sort of legend in the town, whereas the other person who disappears on that night is never heard from again. I think that’s the two different ways that I view history. In one way, you take something that happens and completely reinvent it so that it becomes a legend that doesn’t even have that much to do with what really happened anymore. And the other way is like the woman who doesn’t get to tell her story. Ever.
CT: So there’s the narrative, which is always changing depending on the needs of the teller, or the absence, which is the missing information that you’ve got to invent or fill in.
AH: I realize that what I’m doing is trying to tell a story that certain women never got to tell. I’m trying to tell it for them, or my imagined version of what it could be. It’s not the truth, but I’m trying to get to some kind of emotional truth because they just never got to tell their stories. The book is about the history of this town, but it’s mostly about the history of what happened to women whom nobody really knows the truth about.
CT: So, what are you working on now?
AH: I’ve just finished a historical romance that’s really about falling in love with a book. That’s what happened to me, and I think that happens to a lot of readers and a lot of writers, and I think it especially happens at a certain time in your life, when you’re about twelve to fifteen, you know, that age where books affect you in such a deep way. I mean the books that I remember the most are the books that I read at that time of my life.
CT: What were they?
AH: Definitely Ray Bradbury. I’ve met so many people who think of themselves as Ray’s kids, because he’s a father figure to so many readers and writers. His books have these fantasy elements, but they’re so moral. They’re about worlds that are black and white in terms of morality; they give you a roadmap when you’re searching. When I was reading as a kid I think I was reading to find a more interesting world. I was reading to escape, and I was really aware of wanting to know what other lives were like. It seems to me when you read certain books you feel known. You have that feeling of not being alone because that writer knows how you feel—reading helps you understand what it means to be human.
Published on January 18, 2023
Four Questions for Alice Hoffman
By Daphne Benedis-Grab | Sep 17, 2024
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Alice Hoffman, author of numerous adult and young adult books including Practical Magic and Aquamarine, has a new middle grade book, When We Flew Away, a historically based imagining of Anne Frank’s life before the family was forced into hiding. Young Anne is grappling with her developing identity within her family and community, at times blissfully happy and others deeply contemplative. As she navigates crushes, friendships, and insecurity around her seemingly perfect sister Margo, the shadow of the war and coming danger looms. Hoffman spoke with PW about her relationship with Anne Frank’s diary and what the story has meant to her, as well as the challenge of bringing such a well-known historical figure to life.
When did you first discover Anne Frank and how did her diary impact you at that time?
“
I felt that I knew her but also that she knew me.
”
I first read the diary at the age of 12, which I think is a very important age for readers. What you read at 12 affects you more than anything else will. I read her book as the story of a writer and of a Jewish girl. Before this I hadn’t seen writing as a possibility for me—in school we only read male authors—so that had a huge impact on me. Her voice is so immediate—it made me feel close to her. I think her voice is the best in literary history.
Another thing that impacted me was seeing that it is possible to write the truth and for a book to be so intimate. I felt that I knew her but also that she knew me. And that’s what books are about for me as a reader—and at that age especially it is so important to feel known.
Why did you feel that now was the time to tell this part of her story?
Scholastic approached me and asked if I would be interested in the project. I said yes immediately without thinking it might be emotionally difficult, which it was. They asked because there was the sense that Anne’s story might not be known by younger readers and that it was really important for us all to remember how hatred can tear us apart. My 11-year-old niece who lives in Austria had never heard of Anne and if you forget someone and what they went through, they can disappear. Her story is incredibly specific but at the same time it’s bigger than her and encompasses both the stories of antisemitism and anti-immigration sentiment.
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Can you tell us about your collaboration with the Anne Frank House, and the research you did for the book?
I was so fortunate to work with the experts at the Anne Frank House. The historians there were very helpful with both research and fact checking. I went to Amsterdam to meet them and became quite friendly with them. They helped me follow in Anne’s footsteps, to see as much of her life as I could. It was especially meaningful to see the apartment where her family lived before they took refuge in the attic. But it was also extremely emotional. Writers who are not safe writing in their own countries are invited to stay in the apartment to write. They invited me to do so as well but I found I couldn’t—just being there was really hard because it felt so normal. It was a neighborhood like any other, with dogs barking and kids playing. It made what happened to Anne and her family feel too close.
How did you approach fictionalizing the real events of an extremely well known figure’s life?
I had two outlines: one of the factual historical timeline and the other of the emotional arcs of the characters. The historical arc was completely factual but the emotional arc had to be invented. Writing about historical figures is like trying to solve a mystery as you try to figure out who they were and get as close to them as you can without ever really knowing them. I felt close to Anne when I first read her book and I still do now. That was why I couldn’t write the story in the first person, but I did try to get as close to her as I could. I think that’s what we are always doing as novelists: putting ourselves in the shoes of others. For me, writing the story was a full-circle moment, coming back to what originally inspired me to become a writer. Who would have imagined when I first read her book at age 12 that I’d be involved with an incredible project like this?
When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary by Alice Hoffman. Scholastic Press, $19.99 Sept. 17 ISBN 978-1-338-85694-1
''When We Flew Away'' envisions what Anne might have been like before the cataclysm that shut her away and made her into ''the voice of the Holocaust.''
WHEN WE FLEW AWAY, by Alice Hoffman
''I want to go on living even after my death!'' Anne Frank writes in one of the most unforgettable lines from her venerated ''Diary,'' the book that has done more than any other work of literature to give readers throughout the world a sense of what was lost in the genocide of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Some of those readers -- who also happen to be writers -- have responded to her call by turning her into a fictional character. A version of Anne who survives the war appears in at least three novels, most famously Philip Roth's ''The Ghost Writer'' (1979), in which the young Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego, encounters her as the attractive research assistant to his mentor and fantasizes about marrying her as a way of proving his Jewish bona fides to his parents.
To the best of my knowledge, ''When We Flew Away,'' by the acclaimed novelist Alice Hoffman, is the first book to imagine Anne's life in the years before the diary, as the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands mounted. Starting in May 1940, just before the Nazi invasion, and continuing up to the day the Franks went into hiding, in July 1942, the novel envisions what Anne might have been like before the cataclysm that shut her away from the world and made her into ''the voice of the Holocaust,'' as Hoffman describes her in an afterword to the novel.
''Nobody saw/anything special/in her,'' Jaap Meijer, Anne's seventh-grade history teacher, later wrote in a poem about her. The Anne of Hoffman's book, too, is an ordinary girl who quarrels with her apparently perfect older sister, Margot, and enjoys ice-skating with her friends until Nazi regulations forbid it. At night, she sneaks out of bed to eavesdrop on her parents' conversations. When her father, Otto, tells her of his plan to bring the family to America, she dreams of California: celebrities, palm trees, the Pacific Ocean.
Still, there are glimpses of her emerging sensitivity and depth. She's no great beauty, but when she starts to talk, it's as if a light goes on inside her. She's ''so much more intense than most people.'' And, even more than becoming a movie star, she longs for a friend who truly understands her.
It's clear that Hoffman, who has said that the ''Diary'' was a formative book for her as a child, devoted a great deal of thought to the difficult balancing act of combining history and imagination. She researched Anne's life and visited Amsterdam, touring the neighborhood and apartment where Anne grew up, and meeting with researchers at the Anne Frank House. ''I was afraid; I wanted to do her justice,'' she says in an interview published on the Jewish Book Council's website.
Instead of trying to mimic Anne's voice, Hoffman adopts the lyrical tone of a fairy tale, transforming Amsterdam and its surroundings into a fantastical, almost uncanny environment populated by rabbits, wolves and black moths that appear ominously in moments of stress or fear. Setting the well-known facts of Anne's early life against this background heightens the contrast between the brutality of the world in which the Franks found themselves and the dreamscape of Anne's imagination.
Perhaps because Anne's story is so well known, the episodes drawn directly from life -- such as her family's thwarted attempts to emigrate to the United States -- feel somewhat lacking in dramatic tension. More successful are the scenes Hoffman has invented, such as Anne's encounter with a Nazi who accosts her for setting foot on the frozen river after Jews are no longer allowed to skate or her witnessing the harassment of a younger Jewish boy. ''The Dutch schoolboys were circling the boy in the hat, coming closer to him all the time. ... When Anne cried out for the boy to run, that was exactly what he did.''
Hoffman's attempts to add context to the relationships Anne depicts so vividly in the ''Diary'' are also effective. Anne's readers know that she fights with her mother, Edith, and adores her father, but here we see her younger self sharing tender moments with a mother who understands her better than she thinks. While the Otto of the ''Diary'' is almost always calm and collected, his fictional version hides in the bathroom to weep -- a natural reaction to the walls closing in on his family. In a touch that some readers may see as sacrilege, the most famous line from the ''Diary'' -- Anne's credo that ''people are really good at heart'' -- turns out to be her father's guiding principle.
If the Anne of ''When We Flew Away'' ultimately feels somewhat at arm's length, that's probably inevitable. More than a historical figure, Anne Frank has become an icon whose face appears on billboards and whose words are quoted and misquoted in the service of a panoply of causes she could never have imagined. Every reader has their own version of her. This is Hoffman's: spunky, dreamy and full of promise.
WHEN WE FLEW AWAY | By Alice Hoffman | (Ages 9 to 12) | Scholastic | 304 pp. | $19.99
Ruth Franklin is the author of ''The Many Lives of Anne Frank,'' which will be published in January.
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Franklin, Ruth. "Before the Attic, an Ominous Dreamscape." The New York Times Book Review, 20 Oct. 2024, p. 22. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A812820442/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5c48c4c1. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice WHEN WE FLEW AWAY Scholastic (Children's None) $19.99 9, 17 ISBN: 9781338856941
The story of Anne Frank and her family before the diary that would become an iconic work of the 20th century.
Hoffman imagines the Frank family in Amsterdam--their conversations, feelings, and interactions--during the terrifying time that led up to their hiding and Anne's writing of her diary, which was published posthumously in 1947. Anchored in historically accurate details, this story portrays Anne as both hopeful and scared, clinging to her girlhood and normality even while her personhood was being systematically stripped away. Hoffman examines Anne's complex relationships with her mother and older sister, Margot, in heart-wrenching scenes that show them to be typical of many mothers and daughters. Historical information woven into the narrative serves as time stamps as the Franks move ever closer to their life in hiding. This context is helpful for readers and offers a startling reminder of the terror that took over Europe during World War II. Ultimately, Hoffman portrays Anne and Margot as the children they truly were, gripped with fear and telling each other stories for comfort but still eager to go for bike rides, celebrate birthdays, and try to live their lives fully. This novel serves as an insightful companion for Frank's own diary or as a stand-alone entry into a terrifying and unforgivable time in history.
Deeply moving and beautifully written. (afterword, further reading)(Historical fiction. 9-12)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Hoffman, Alice: WHEN WE FLEW AWAY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A801499653/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e3f8a474. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary
Alice Hoffman. Scholastic Press, $ 19.99 (304p) ISBN 978-1-338-85694-1
In collaboration with the Anne Frank House, Hoffman (The Invisible Hour, for adults) presents a thoroughly researched fictionalized account of Anne Frank's life. Starting in 1940 and leading up to the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1942, the author chronicles the years during which Anne lived happily with her family in Amsterdam. Following the Nazi Party's takeover of Germany and her family's subsequent move to the Netherlands, Anne's biggest concerns involve her mother's "disapproving when Anne talked too much or acted as if she knew the answers to most questions" and her own insecurities surrounding her older sister's seeming perfection. But Anne is buoyed by her beloved grandmother and her father's continual nurturing of her curiosity and creativity. Via lyrical and chatty third-person narration, Hoffman crafts a sympathetic three-dimensional rendering that showcases new facets of a figure whom readers may only know one side of. Depictions of historical events such as Germany's defeat of the Netherlands heighten the novel's tense atmosphere. Though the conclusion is inescapable, the moments of joy Anne and her family experience throughout serve to emphasize Anne's belief that writing "could make people understand you." Ages 8-12. (Sept.)
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"When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 25, 24 June 2024, pp. 63+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A800404916/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=01cd1a49. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice THE INVISIBLE HOUR Atria (Fiction None) $27.99 8, 15 ISBN: 9781982175375
In this story of a young woman's attempt to control her destiny, Hoffman combines a paean to reading and books--specifically one book--with time-travel fantasy.
Fifteen-year-old Mia Jacob lives unhappily in the Community, a modern-day cult in western Massachusetts, where women who fail to obey the rigid rules set by despotic leader Joel Davis must wear letters around their necks or branded on their arms. (Sound familiar?) Mia's mother, Ivy, who came to the Community as a pregnant, runaway teen and reluctantly married Joel, now secretly encourages Mia's small rebellions, steering her to read books, an activity Joel made Ivy abandon. Mia becomes obsessed with The Scarlet Letter after finding a first edition mysteriously inscribed "To Mia." After Ivy's death, Mia escapes the Community. Under the tutelage of Constance Allen and Sarah Mott, a loving couple of lesbian librarians in Concord (where Hawthorne is buried), she finishes growing up and becomes a librarian herself, although Joel continues hounding her. One day, while visiting Hawthorne's grave, she makes a wish that she could meet the author. Poof! At its midpoint, Hoffman's novel transforms from a relatively realistic story of female empowerment and the spiritual/psychological magic of reading into pure fantasy. Mia finds herself transported to 1837 Salem. Hawthorne, a struggling young writer whose book Twice-Told Tales has recently been a commercial flop, finds Mia asleep in the grass. She lamely announces, "I came from another time only to meet you," and they fall rapturously in love, but the inevitable time-travel question arises: If she stays with him, will she alter history? Mia recognizes that The Scarlet Letter is her life story; if the book did not exist, would she? Hoffman makes Nathaniel dreamily appealing and creates a riveting voice for his sister Elizabeth, whose brilliance is thwarted by the times in which she lives, but Mia is more author's puppet than character, and Hoffman's worthy message concerning women's rights feels repetitive and ultimately didactic. More important, the realism and fantasy never quite jibe.
Not one of Hoffman's best, but it may spark a desire to reread Hawthorne.
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"Hoffman, Alice: THE INVISIBLE HOUR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A752722890/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8d925799. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
The Invisible Hour. By Alice Hoffman. Aug. 2023.240p. Atria, $27.99 (9781982175375); e-book (9781982175399).
Hoffman concluded her Practical Magic series with The Book of Magic (2021), but she continues to explore the ravishing Massachusetts countryside and the haunting legacy of the Puritans. Rebellious Boston teenager Ivy, a passionate reader, runs away after becoming pregnant. She ends up at the Community in the Berkshires, a dystopian cult ruled by a charismatic tyrant, Joel, who forbids the reading of books. Ivy's daughter, Mia, is also brave and book-hungry. She finds sanctuary in the town's library and a friend in the librarian, but no one can protect Mia from Joel until she finds a startling escape hatch: a first edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Scarlet Letter. Hoffman summons all of her extraordinary storytelling magic to whisk us back to Hawthorne's world, turning our ardor for books into a force that transcends time, our love for authors into something truly erotic. As she contrasts women's lives past and present and considers the mysterious compulsions to write and read, Hoffman's fresh and evocative time-travel tale becomes a lush and suspenseful homage to the transporting and lifesaving power of books. --Donna Seaman
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Hoffman's bewitchment always draws readers, who will deeply appreciate this imaginative and timely assertion of women's rights and celebration of books, libraries, and the freedom to read.
YA: Older teens will be enthralled by Ivy and Mia and their struggles for freedom and love of books, as well as the novel's otherworldly dimensions. DS.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 American Library Association
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Seaman, Donna. "The Invisible Hour." Booklist, vol. 119, no. 17, 1 May 2023, pp. 19+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A748959154/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7cee7cec. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
The Invisible Hour
Alice Hoffman. Atria, $27.99 (250p) ISBN 978-1-982175-37-5
Hoffman (the Practical Magic series) keeps up her flair for the fantastical with this enchanting tale of a woman and her daughter living in an oppressive modern-day commune, where they find comfort in books. Ivy Jacob's ever-disappointed mother and stern father react badly to news of her teen pregnancy, prompting her to run away from her tony Boston home for Western Massachusetts, where she's embraced by a group called The Community. There, she gives birth to her daughter, Mia, and marries the group's charismatic but controlling leader, Joel, when Mia is three months old. The Community's rules are draconian--members are branded with letters corresponding to their alleged crimes--and eventually the abuse weighs on Ivy's conscience. At 16, Mia secretly takes out books from a nearby library (education and reading are forbidden after members turn 15), and she tries to convince her mother to join her in an escape. Alternate chapters portray Nathaniel Hawthorne's writing life in the mid-19th century, and a series of time-traveling twists illuminate Hawthorne's inspiration for The Scarlet Letter, Mia's favorite book. Though the evil Joel is a bit one-dimensional, the portrayal of Hawthorne is credible and the conceit feels truly magical. For the most part, Hoffman manages not to break the spell. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners. (Aug.)
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"The Invisible Hour." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 18, 1 May 2023, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A749619597/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5eb654f0. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
THE BOOK OF MAGICBy Alice Hoffman
''Some stories begin at the beginning and others begin at the end.'' So opens ''The Book of Magic,'' the final installment of Alice Hoffman's popular Practical Magic series, a page-turning fairy tale of a saga that spans three books, one star-studded movie adaptation and multiple centuries of adventure and misadventure, love lost and found and bottomless cauldrons of sorcery in the lives of the bewitchingly witchy Owens family.
''The Book of Magic'' begins at an ending: the imminent demise of Jet, the beautiful witch who, with her sister Franny, are the aging matriarchs of the Owens clan. When Jet learns from her own reflection in a library mirror that she has only seven days left to live, she leaves for Manhattan for a last, secret tryst with her longtime lover, Rafael. Jet and Rafael have kept their connection under wraps for decades because they are cursed. This is the legacy of Maria Owens, the first woman in the family to leave England for Massachusetts in the 17th century. As she stood in the gallows, having been sentenced to death for witchcraft, Maria called a curse upon anyone in her family, then or ever, who fell in love.
Like Maria, Jet and Franny have magic running through their veins. They know how to mix star tulip and rosemary, anise and cloves to decipher dreams or coax back love. But their powers are no match for the family curse, which has claimed the lives of their husbands as well as two husbands of their niece, Sally. The relationships that survived, like Jet and Rafael's, and that of Sally's sister Gillian, have only made it by virtue of remaining hidden. While these women have strategically avoided marriage, children and open displays of affection, Jet and Franny's younger brother, Vincent, took a different tack: He fled to France with his lover and disappeared.
Sally's daughters, Kylie and Antonia, have been blissfully ignorant about the curse -- until Jet's funeral. Not long afterward, Kylie's boyfriend, Gideon, is hit by a car and falls into a coma. Kylie learns that right before her grandaunt Jet died, she discovered an ancient book of dark magic that contained, among other powerful hexes, one that could break curses. The spell was so dangerous that Jet sealed shut the relevant pages of the book with magic.
Desperate to save Gideon, Kylie flees to England, where the book, and her family, originated. Would it have been wiser for Kylie to ask the witches in her family for help before bolting across the Atlantic with an evil book of unspeakable power? Sure, but that would have spoiled the adventure -- and not just for Kylie. Her entire family, save the very pregnant Antonia, follow her to London in a multigenerational rescue mission. Even Vincent, missing for four decades, reappears and joins the cavalcade.
Hoffman is not afraid to use a healthy dollop of deus ex machina to keep her complicated story moving. And move it does -- though for the first 100 or so pages, readers get bogged down in detailed, sometimes confusing, back stories of a sprawling cast of characters. Once Kylie lands in London, though, the book finds its zing. A vengeful villain tricks Kylie into handing over the ancient book; a poisoned man is saved; there is a plague, and death and love. If the ending feels overly tidy, well, fairy tales don't enchant with nuance so much as the sweep of their stories. And, like the witches who populate her stories, Hoffman certainly knows how to enchant.
Joanne Ramos is the author of ''The Farm.'' THE BOOK OF MAGIC By Alice Hoffman 400 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.99.
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Ramos, Joanne. "Bewitched." The New York Times Book Review, 14 Nov. 2021, p. 40(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A682339057/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9f613446. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice THE BOOK OF MAGIC Simon & Schuster (Fiction None) $27.99 10, 5 ISBN: 978-1-982151-48-5
In the conclusion to Hoffman’s Practical Magic series, a present-day family of witches and healers wages a final battle against the curse that has plagued them since 1680.
Thanks to an ancestor’s bitter curse, anyone who's been in love with and/or been loved by an Owens family member for the last 300 years has met death and tragedy (with rare exceptions involving risks and personal sacrifice). Hoffman’s prequel, Magic Lessons (2020), detailed the origin of the curse. In this series finale, Hoffman brings the three most recent generations together: sisters Sally and Gillian, whose youthful adventures introduced the series in Practical Magic (1995); their beloved elderly aunts, Jet and Franny, and long-lost uncle Vincent, children themselves in 1960s Manhattan in Rules of Magic (2017); and Sally’s daughters, Kylie and Antonia, whom she’s shielded from knowledge of their unusual heritage and its curse. The novel opens with Jet about to die, aware she has no time to use the knowledge she’s recently gained to end the curse herself. Instead, she leaves clues that send her survivors on a circuitous path involving a mysterious book filled with magic that could be dangerous in the wrong hands. Then an accident makes the need to break the curse acute. What follows is a novel overripe with plot twists, lofty romances, and some ugly violence along with detailed magic recipes, enjoyably sly literary references, and somewhat repetitive memories of key moments from the previous volumes. While centered in the Massachusetts town where the Owens family moved in the 17th century, the novel travels to current-day England (briefly detouring to France) and becomes a battle of good versus evil. The Owens women’s greatest challenge is knowing whom to trust—or love. Hoffman strongly hints that the danger arising when someone chooses incorrectly is less a matter of magic than psychology and morality. Ultimately, for better or worse, each Owens woman must face her fear of love. For all the talk of magic, the message here is that personal courage and the capacity to love are the deepest sources of an individual’s power.
An overly rich treacle tart, sweet and flavorful but hard to get through.
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"Hoffman, Alice: THE BOOK OF MAGIC." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A669986559/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=076702be. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
MAGIC LESSONSBy Alice Hoffman
At the beginning of the year -- a lifetime ago -- I considered calling a witch. A few friends had recommended her, and I thought she might offer me new ways to think about my purpose and gifts. A year before that, when I was pregnant and suffering from sciatica, my hairstylist gave me her healer's business card. (Now you know: Healers have business cards.)
I didn't end up calling either woman, but they persist in my thoughts. Someday, I think, they might guide or cure me.
So I may be the perfect reader for Alice Hoffman's novels about the Owens family, whose bloodline vibrates with witchy power. The Owens women possess gray eyes, an expertise with nightshades and a vast knowledge of spells, particularly those for love.
Hoffman's latest, ''Magic Lessons,'' is the third of these books. Her first, ''Practical Magic,'' which was a best seller and the basis of a popular film, follows two orphaned sisters sent to Massachusetts to live with their aunts in a mysterious house where there ''were no clocks and no mirrors and three locks on each and every door.'' After twilight, the aunts are visited by desperate women. Some need a tea for an upset stomach, or an herb for nerves, but most want help with love. The story of the Owens sisters, and the daughters of the next generation, is one of trying -- and failing -- to eschew love, and even magic, in the name of self-protection. Oh, if only.
Like the second book (''Rules for Magic''), ''Magic Lessons'' is a prequel, though it goes much further back, to the late 17th century, to tell the story of the matriarch, Maria Owens. Maria built the aunts' house; it's her portrait that hung on the staircase landing for 192 years. A brief biography in the first novel becomes, in ''Magic Lessons,'' a rich, continent-leaping epic of Maria's life. She is discovered in a snowy field in rural England, in 1664, by Hannah Owens, who is known to practice the ''Nameless Art.'' Hannah herself was imprisoned for her skills and, when she finds Maria, she is living in the woods, ''apart from the delusions and bad intentions of men.''
Soon, Hannah recognizes the child's gifts, and teaches Maria everything she knows. When Maria is 10, they discover that her birth mother is also a witch -- and that she has made some bad decisions in the name of love, just as her descendants one day will do.
Tragedy brings Maria to indentured servitude on the island of Curacao. There she falls for a rich merchant and becomes pregnant. Her child, Faith, also has the sight. It's predictable that the man Maria is infatuated with is no Mr. Right. ''The women in their family had the talent of the Nameless Art,'' Maria's birth mother confesses, ''but they all had difficulties with love.''
Maria's beloved also happens to be the historical figure John Hathorne, one of the judges in the Salem witch trials. When Maria heads to the Massachusetts Bay Colony to track John down, we know things won't pan out as she'd hoped. The historical irony provides a protracted Girl don't go in there! brand of suspense; it's enjoyable, if a little on the nose.
This is merely the first third of the novel, which takes us from Maria's devotion to John Hathorne to her revenge on him, to Faith's development as a witch and her turn to dark magic. And beyond.
A lot happens, yet the plot doesn't feel overstuffed. Storytelling is in Hoffman's bones, and the skill with which she dispenses information and compresses time, so that a year passes in a sentence, so that a tragedy witnessed becomes the propeller for a hundred-page subplot, is (forgive me) bewitching. My current reality feels chaotic and confusing; to have a narrator take my hand and tell me that linden root and yarrow will cure a racing heart, that witches turn silver dull with their touch, is an undiluted pleasure.
But for all its delights, ''Magic Lessons'' is dark. Witch after witch suffers at the hands of ignorant, cruel men. ''It was a dangerous world for women,'' the narrator declares, ''and more dangerous for a woman whose very bloodlines would have her do not as she was ordered, but as she pleased.'' That this novel is both fantasy and history is crucial. Actual women in Salem, Mass., and, before that, in Essex County, England, were murdered. ''There were other ways to be rid of a woman who didn't behave,'' Hoffman writes. ''You held her head under water until she could no longer speak.'' Twenty-five years ago, when the Owens family appeared in ''Practical Magic,'' the tone was whimsical and cute. ''Magic Lessons'' is neither.
Witchcraft comes at a price to those who practice it, and with this novel, Hoffman reminds us that every woman, magical or not, pays, be it with her life, or how she must dress, or whom she must marry. We've always known that, for certain women, the cost is higher. This deeper subject is so resonant that, at times, the novel's love theme struck me as contrived, even irrelevant, a vestige of a franchise that has grown darker and deeper. However, the disconnect did not inhibit my enjoyment; Hoffman's book swept me away during a time I most needed it.
Which reminds me: I need to call that witch.
Edan Lepucki is the author of the novels ''California'' and ''Woman No. 17.'' MAGIC LESSONS By Alice Hoffman 416 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.99.
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Lepucki, Edan. "Witch Hunt." The New York Times Book Review, 25 Oct. 2020, p. 21(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A639356144/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ba222667. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice MAGIC LESSONS Simon & Schuster (Fiction None) $27.99 10, 6 ISBN: 978-1-982108-84-7
Set in late-17th-century England and America, the pre-prequel to Hoffman’s Practical Magic (1995) and The Rules of Magic (2017) covers the earliest generations of magically empowered Owens women and the legacy they created.
In 1664, Hannah Owens, practitioner of “the Nameless Art” sometimes called witchcraft, finds baby Maria abandoned near her isolated cottage in Essex County, England. She lovingly teaches ancient healing methods to Maria, whose star birthmark indicates inherent magical powers; and since Hannah considers ink and paper the most powerful magic, she also teaches Maria reading and writing. After vengeful men murder Hannah in 1674, Maria escapes first to her unmotherly birth mother, a troubled practitioner of dark, self-serving magic, then to Curacao as an indentured servant. At 15 she is seduced by 37-year-old American businessman John Hathorne (his name an allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote about mistreatment of marked women). Enchanted by the island, Puritan Hathorne loses his rigidity long enough to impregnate Maria before returning to Salem, Massachusetts, without saying goodbye. Maria, with new daughter Faith, whose birthmark is a half-moon, follows him. The ship on which she travels is captained by a Sephardic Jew who gives her passage in return for treating his son’s dengue fever, an excuse for Hoffman to link two long-standing unfair persecutions—of smart women as witches and Jews as, well, Jews. That Maria will find a truer love with warmhearted Jewish sailor Sam than with icy Hathorne makes sense in terms of later Owens women’s stories. For the earlier books to work, Maria must found her female dynasty in Salem, but first she and Faith face betrayals, mistakes, and moral challenges. Maria uses her powers to help others but often misreads her own future with devastating results; separated from Maria during her childhood, emotionally damaged Faith is tempted to use her grandmother’s selfish “left-handed” magic.
Master storyteller Hoffman’s tale pours like cream but is too thick with plot redundancies and long-winded history lessons.
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"Hoffman, Alice: MAGIC LESSONS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634467441/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a15776fd. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $27.99 9, 24 ISBN: 978-1-5011-3757-0
In this tale of a young German Jewish girl under the protection of a golem--a magical creature of Jewish myth created from mud and water--Hoffman (The Rules of Magic, 2017, etc.) employs her signature lyricism to express the agony of the Holocaust with a depth seldom equaled in more seemingly realistic accounts.
The golem, named Ava, comes into being in 1941 Berlin. Recently made a widow by the Gestapo and desperate to get her 12-year-old daughter, Lea, out of Germany, Hanni Kohn hires Ettie, a rabbi's adolescent daughter who has witnessed her father creating a golem, to make a female creature who must obey Hanni by protecting Lea at all costs. Ettie uses Hanni's payment to escape on the same train toward France as Lea and Ava, but the two human girls' lives take different paths. Ettie, who has always chafed at the limits placed on her gender, becomes a Resistance fighter set on avenging her younger sister's killing by Nazis. Lea, under Ava's supernatural care, escapes the worst ravages of the war, staying first with distant cousins in Paris (already under Gestapo rule), where she falls in love with her hosts' 14-year-old son, Julien; then in a convent school hiding Jewish girls in the Rhone Valley; then in a forest village not far from where Ettie has partnered in her Resistance activities with Julien's older brother. While Lea's experiences toughen and mature her, Ettie never stops mourning her sister but finds something like love with a gentle gentile doctor who has his own heartbreaking backstory. In fact, everyone in the large cast of supporting human characters--as well as the talking heron that is Ava's love interest and Azriel, the Angel of Death--becomes vividly real, but Ava the golem is the heart of the book. Representing both fierce maternal love and the will to survive, she forces Lea and Ettie to examine their capacities to make ethical choices and to love despite impossible circumstances.
A spellbinding portrait of what it means to be human in an inhuman world.
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"Hoffman, Alice: THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A593064697/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7abafe21. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Alice Hoffman's loyal readers--of whom there are a great, great many--may be surprised to learn she's written a Holocaust novel. The popular author of 3 7 previous books, including numerous bestsellers and an Oprah's Book Club selection, is best known for her romance-filled tales of witches, spells and cold New England winters, as well as novels that evoke her own gritty working-class youth in 1950s Long Island. Her highest-profile title is probably still the 1995 Practical Magic, made into a 1998 movie starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, about a couple of witch sisters trying to live normal lives and avoid bringing doom on the men who love them. Her Oprah book, Here on Earth (1997), is a sly retelling of Emily Bronte's Wuthermg Heights in which the Cathy character doesn't the young but survives to pick up where her doomed romance with Heathcliff left off. (Spoiler: It's still doomed.)
In recent years, Hoffman has dipped with increasing frequency into Jewish history. The Dovekeepers (2011) traced four women caught in the fall of Masada; Incantation (2006), written for young adult readers, was a brief, grim and gripping account of a converso family in the Inquisition in the 1400s; and The Marriage of Opposites (2015), the story of the painter Camille Pissarro and his strong-willed mother, painted a vivid and surprising picture of 19th-century Jewish life on the island of St. Thomas in the West Indies.
And yet The World That We Knew, out in September, is still a departure for the 67-year-old author. It checks all the boxes of the now-familiar Holocaust blockbuster genre: a sweeping, multicharacter plot; danger, bereavement, resistance and survival in multiple stories that snake through wartime Paris, Berlin and the safe-haven village of Le Chambon; narrow escapes; and ghastly outcomes for the brave. Since it's an Alice Hoffman novel, there's also a wild card, in the form of a golem--a female golem, at that--created by a rabbi's daughter for a desperate mother who hopes that a golem can shepherd her daughter to safety.
In person, Hoffman is a cozy, almost motherly presence, speaking in gentle tones and betraying none of the spiky sensibility of her characters. As the interview proceeds, though--in a nook of a plush hotel lobby in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near where she's lived since 1979--her eyes suddenly flash with annoyance. A business-attired man in the next nook is shouting into his cell phone, slicing across her soft diction.
"I'm sorry, I'm going to fix this," she says, and gets up. She walks over, says two or three words to him, comes back and sits down; when we look again, he's not just quiet--he's disappeared completely. "I'm scary," she says, with a slight twinkle. "There, that's good practical magic."
Was it a conscious choice for you to finally take on the Holocaust? It was. I had previously avoided the Holocaust. I was actually asked to write the screenplay for Schindler's List, before Steven Spielberg got involved. And I didn't feel I could do it. But now I feel differently.
Why? Pardy, I felt it was my last chance to meet survivors and try to understand how they could go through something like that and continue to be in the world. That's what I really wanted to find out. After all that has happened, can this still be the world that they knew? (The title alludes to that.) And how can they still want to be in it?
In the preface of The World That We Knew, you describe meeting a survivor who wanted you to tell her story, and you said, "No, no, I don't do that." But then you did. What changed? Getting older was part of it, and seeing what's happening around us. I really began to write this book after the 2016 election. I was working on another book, and I set it aside. I see a lot of similarities between then and now, and it's very scary. It's really important to keep this story in mind. You've said something similar about writing Incantation (2006), your book for young adults about the tragic unmasking of a converso family during the Inquisition. That one I wrote, really, because I realized I knew nothing about the Inquisition. I'd never learned about it in school. I recently went to Portugal. I wanted to go to different sites, and there's no sign that anything ever happened. There was nothing left.
At the time, you also said you wrote the book partly in response to the Mel Gibson movie The Passion of the Christ, which was accused of having anti-Semitic overtones. You said that your Jewish identity was "comfortable but paranoid." Do you still feel that way? Is it paranoia, or is it just being smart? I certainly was raised like that, like "Always have a packed suitcase." And my grandmother and my mother told me, "Whatever you do, as a woman, make sure you can earn your own living." There's some overlap.
Should Jews be paranoid right now?
We should be more paranoid than we are, if you ask me. I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm concerned. I was writing about children being separated from their parents during the Holocaust, and then it started to happen on our border. It is very disturbing to see the similarities. And I didn't know until I started to do research for the book that, in France, they started by deporting refugees. There are differences, of course, but when you start separating children from their parents and losing those children, you're dehumanizing them. Once you start objectifying and dehumanizing people, it leads to really horrible places. A lot of French people did great things, but a lot of them just watched it happen. I feel like a lot of us are watching it happen.
Do you feel you've been on a Jewish journey? Until recently, so many of your books were about New England. I've always been working on the same themes. Writers do that. I'm always writing about love and loss and different kinds of survivorship. My first stories were from my Russian Jewish grandmother.
Were they about pogroms and persecutions? No. Mostly fairy tales about trying to escape from her small village--at least, they all seemed like fairy tales to me, because they seemed so highly unbelievable. And my grandfather was a Yiddish writer, not particularly successful. He was published in The Forward. He died young and his friends put his work together in a book, and I found it at the Yiddish Book Center at Hampshire College and had parts of it translated. He wrote an essay about his political conversion. He was eight years old, in the Ukraine, on a summer day, and he was working in a factory, and he heard children playing. And he went outside and saw the factory owner's children playing in a lake. And at that moment, he said, everything changed for him. He saw it all, his whole political future. He became a socialist. To hear his voice in the piece was very interesting. It influenced me, somewhere in the back of my mind. I wrote a novel about the unions in New York and the Triangle Factory fire (The Museum of Extraordinary Things, 2014).
Did you have any Jewish practice growing up? No, none. Just cultural. I was near New York, so everyone is Jewish, and you don't have to.
You've said your books are "a handbook on how to deal with sorrow." Do you feel you're doing that with the huge sorrow of the Holocaust?
I do feel that. I also felt it when I wrote The Dovekeepers, about the fall of Masada, such a crazy choice for me, because I knew nothing, I mean, really nothing about that subject.
How did that happen? I have family in Israel. I've spent time there. I went to Masada with an archaeologist, and I didn't expect to feel anything, but I felt something really intense. It's a spiritual place, and I'm not a spiritual person, but I felt I could hear the voices of the people who had been there. And then I saw a sign that said there had been survivors, which I had never heard before. So then I got interested. That was really a huge undertaking for me, in terms of both research and imagination. I felt I was telling the stories of women who never got to tell their own stories. The last time I went back, the head of research at Masada said to me that he had never thought about the women who had been up there. And really, who did?
Do you feel that Jewish tradition has a lot of holes where women's stories should be? Every tradition does. That's what interested me too with my book about the painter Camille Pissarro's mother. I went to an exhibition of Pissarro in Massachusetts, and it said something about his being Jewish--which I didn't know--and then it said his mother had created the biggest scandal that ever happened in St. Thomas. And then I thought, "Oh, I'm interested in her, not him."
Do you feel you're doing midrash, reclaiming women's voices, the way Anita Diamant did with The Red Tent? Maybe. I love that book and I love her. I feel like we're all silenced, don't you? When I was in school, we didn't read any women writers who weren't either British or dead. When I went to graduate school and read Grace Paley, that just blew the top of my head off. Reading her was huge. I didn't know what I could write as a woman that mattered--all the big books were about men at war. When I read Grace Paley, I realized that I could just write about being human.
Did raising your sons have anything to do with getting closer to Jewish tradition? No, it wasn't that. I don't know what it was. Maybe because my grandmother is no longer here, and it was a way to feel closer to her.
Some of the characters in your new novel are very observant; there are a lot of blessings and religious rituals. Well, that's not me, personally. I wish I was a person who had a religious practice and a faith, but I'm not. I just have faith in literature.
Why do you write so much about witches and magic? As a reader, I always wanted to escape. And as a writer, I feel the same exact way. For me, literature and magic are kind of melded together. I never really understood calling magical realism a new-technique, because it's been around forever. It's connected with women and fairy tales and the stories that grandmothers tell grandchildren. For me, it's a literary tradition, maybe a women's literary tradition, in which it just seems totally normal for magic to happen. And there's something else. When I did research about the Inquisition, I found that the only European countries where there were no witch trials were Spain and Portugal. I think the persecution of the Jews filled the same purpose.
So the witches in your books are really Jews? No, they're not Jews, but they're people without power--women, persecuted because they don't have power. As a little girl, I was attracted to stories about witches because they were the only female characters with power.
Is that why your Holocaust story needed a golem? And a female golem, at that? I did a lot of research into golems, and the only female golems anyone mentioned were used either for sex or for housecleaning. But I was also writing about what it's like to lose your children, what it's like to lose your mother. It just came to me that way because the people I talked to were mostly children who were sent away and never saw their parents again. Those were the ones who survived. And I thought, well, if you were a mother and you wanted to put your child in the care of a golem, it certainly wouldn't be a male golem. You would go to another woman.
I feel she's a unique character. In the traditional Yiddish folktales and the Isaac Bashevis Singer folktales, the golem is very much an "it," just a creature.
Did you have qualms about putting magic in a book about the Holocaust? I thought about that a lot, because I felt I couldn't write this book in a realistic fashion. One, because I'm not a historian, I'll never know the whole story. But beyond that, I felt I couldn't get to the heart of the matter, really, by telling just the facts. I had to find another way into the story. I don't think I could have written it any other way. I tried, and it just didn't work.
But also, fairy tales and myths are a way to explain what is completely illogical and makes no sense. And the Holocaust really doesn't make sense. You can't explain why people did what they did. You can't explain why some people lived and some people died.
I asked a great scholar from Harvard, Susan Suleiman, to read the book and vet it. And she says in one of her own books, "History is luck." When people told me about their experiences, it was like that: The train turned around, the train didn't go, their mother sent them here and not there. It's just luck. Fairy tales and myths try to give some sort of explanation for that.
Were you worried that the novel would make the Holocaust seem to make sense? No, I was worried that people who had lived through it would feel it wasn't the story. I asked another French historian, who's involved with an organization that investigates mass graves, to read it, and he said it surprised him, but he was very positive. So I felt a lot of relief.
The story of the golem is very life-affirming. Was it a challenge to set that against a Holocaust backdrop? That was the question. How do you continue to live in a world that's falling apart and cruel? I think the answer really is life-affirming.
You got that message from the survivors you knew? And from writing the book. I think I know more as a writer than I know as a person. I always feel like I write the book for myself, so as to find out the answer.
So, what did you find out? Live. That's the answer.
A JEW IN 2019
No matter how many generations our forebears lived in a country we are always seen by many as those who can't belong: the outsider on whom can hang any mask of what's forbidden, nasty, below contempt. Seen at once as weak and dangerous we can be attacked righteously, hate as patriotic virtue, religious entitlement. We think we're safe, assimilated, at home, belonging.
Then we're killed just for something Invisible, nothing done or said. Because of our mothers' identity. Once again look over our shoulders.
Once again lock our doors tight. Stay quiet in public. Change your name. Consider moving across a border. Teach your children fear.
Marge Piercy has published 17 novels, including the New York Times Best Seller Gone to Soldiers and He, She and It, winner of the 1993 Arthur C. Clark Award. In addition to her novels, Piercy has written 19 volumes of poetry and a memoir, Sleeping with Cats. She is an engaged antiwar, feminist and environmental activist.
by Amy E. Schwartz
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Moment Magazine
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Schwartz, Amy E. "The Magic of Alice Hoffman: HER NEW NOVEL TAKES ON THE HOLOCAUST WITH THE HELP OF A RARE FEMALE GOLEM." Moment, Sept.-Oct. 2019, pp. 31+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A604316033/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=01f128e4. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW By Alice Hoffman
Arguably, every single historical novel should evoke those two much-quoted lines of William Faulkner's: ''The past is never dead. It's not even past.'' But coming away from Alice Hoffman's gravely beautiful new novel, ''The World That We Knew,'' historical fiction that transports you to Germany and France in the 1940s and, thus, the Holocaust, those words ring particularly true. Her subjects are preteen and teenage refugees on the run from Berlin and Paris, but with them, she conjures up contemporary children fending for themselves after being separated from their parents by today's horrors.
Her hymn to the power of resistance, perseverance and enduring love in dark times employs a character of ancient magical realism, the golem. Although it brings together several narratives, it's primarily the story of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, Lea Kohn, who manages to flee Berlin on a train bound for France in the spring of 1941. Lea's father, a doctor, has been murdered, and Lea has narrowly escaped being raped. Her mother, Hanni, and grandmother, Bobeshi, know they will soon be taken by the Nazis, and their only hope is that Lea will survive. Everyone is desperate. In Berlin, the newspapers print photographs of Jewish businessmen, lawyers and professors with captions calling them animals. ''That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind. It brought up ancient fears and scattered them on the street like pearls. To fight what was wicked, magic and faith were needed. This is what one must turn to when there was no other option.''
This is what Hoffman turns to, mixing brutal realities with magical realism. In the opening chapters, Hanni seeks out a rabbi to create a golem, that artificial creature from Jewish legend, in hopes it can serve as Lea's bodyguard. Only Ettie, the rabbi's daughter, is willing to take the risk of attempting this feat: She too has a young girl she wishes to get out of Berlin, her younger sister, Marta. Built of mud from the banks of the river Spree, Ava, the golem Ettie creates, is infused with Hanni's tears and Marta's menstrual blood and brought to life through a recitation of the secret names of God. Ava is tall, strong and confident. She learns languages -- including birdsong -- in minutes and can kill on Lea's behalf.
Ava's commitment is unwavering, but her love for the world grows each day as she and her charges navigate their way through France. This, Ettie has warned, is the danger involved in bringing a golem to life, and much of the novel's suspense hinges on Ava's evolving humanity, which Lea has been told is dangerous. Yet the reader comes to accept Ava: The primary miracle of her existence is the way she holds Hanni's love for Lea and keeps it alive.
Hoffman has written about Jews under siege before: in her 2006 novel for younger readers, ''Incantation,'' set during the Spanish Inquisition, and in 2011's ''The Dovekeepers,'' about the Roman siege of Masada. In ''The World That We Knew'' she focuses on more modern times as her narrative traverses the French countryside, stopping at the barns and convents and schools where children might be able to seek shelter and hide, if only for a little while. Her storytelling isn't seamless. She sends her fictional characters into known history, wedging in pieces of background information that can feel exactly like that. But even as Hoffman the researcher shows her work, Hoffman the storyteller continues to dazzle.
Mary Pols, the author of a memoir, ''Accidentally on Purpose,'' is editor of Maine Women Magazine. THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW By Alice Hoffman 372 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.
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PHOTO: Alice Hoffman (PHOTOGRAPH BY DEBORAH FEINGOLD)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The New York Times Company
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Pols, Mary. "The Bodyguard." The New York Times Book Review, 13 Oct. 2019, p. 16(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A602505244/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4244f99c. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
The World That We Knew
By Alice Hoffman
Historical Fiction
Alice Hoffman is a brilliant weaver of magic and the mundane, as many of her novels have proven over the years. In her hands, a story we think we know, from a time we think we've extracted every possible detail, can become a soulful new voyage into the heart of the human condition. With her latest novel, The World That We Knew (Simon & Schuster, $27.99, 9781501137570), Hoffman travels to a hidden world built amid the horrors of the Holocaust and brings forth a spellbinding tale of love, loss and what it means to endure.
Hoffman's story begins in 1941 in Berlin, where a young Jewish mother, Hanni, knows that she must find a way to smuggle her daughter, Lea, out of the city before the Nazis take notice of her. To do this, she turns to a rabbi for mystical help, only to discover that his daughter, Ettie, is more willing to help Lea through magical means. Ettie, working from knowledge she's gained through observing her father, crafts a golem they call Ava to guide and protect Lea. Thus begins an unlikely and harrowing journey through France, where Ettie finds a new purpose, Lea finds her soul mate and Ava finds that she's much more than a single-minded creation.
In beautifully precise prose, Hoffman chronicles the experiences of these characters and those whose lives they touch along the way. Throughout the next three years of the war, each woman tries to survive while also pursuing her own process of self-discovery. Though Nazi-occupied France is an endlessly compelling place to many readers, Hoffman never takes her historical setting for granted. Rather than leaving us to lean on what we think we know, she weaves a fully realized vision of the hidden parts of history, chronicling the stories of people who slipped through the cracks on their way to freedom and the emotional toll that freedom took.
Page by page, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, The World That We Knew presents a breathtaking, deeply emotional odyssey through the shadows of a dimming world while never failing to convince us that there is light somewhere at the end of it all. This book feels destined to become a high point in an already stellar career.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 BookPage
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Jackson, Matthew. "The World That We Knew." BookPage, Oct. 2019, p. 18. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A600663178/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=293ee1d6. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman, Simon & Schuster, 2017, $27.99, he.
I love it when a writer gives us a book that we didn't realize we wanted until it shows up in the bookstore. Hoffman's Practical Magic (1995) is a real favorite of mine, but I never considered another book connected to it, either a prequel or a sequel. If I had, I might have been concerned that it wouldn't be good enough, or it would take something away from the one I loved so much. But this is Alice Hoffman.
As a writer, I often get asked to name my favorite author. It's an impossible question because the best writers don't wait for us to be in the mood to read their books, they put us in the mood. So, depending on what we're reading at various times, we all have many favorite writers.
But the question gets asked of me often enough that I simply offer up Alice Hoffman in response.
It's an honest response. Whether it's the aforementioned Practical Magic , which I first came across in the mid-nineties, or any of the books that she has written on the way to this most recent novel, Hoffman is always a writer I can count on to deliver stories and characters that mean something to me.
Oh, and that glorious prose, at once timeless and of the moment, all of it seeped in a sense of wonder. Whenever I need to be reminded what good writing is, and why it's good, I reread a few chapters from one of her books. Hoffman's stories nourish my soul, and this new novel is yet another gift to us from her talented pen.
So while normally I have a little trepidation when an author revisits a past glory, when I heard about The Rules of Magic , I couldn't wait to get my hands on a copy.
Now before you ask, you don't need to have read Practical Magic first (this new book's a prequel after all). But even if you have, it won't spoil The Rules of Magic , because the new book has a different cast and focus and doesn't really connect until you get to the end, where you might have a few "of course" moments. Or at least I did.
The backdrop is the sixties--New York City and Greenwich Village for much of it, a small town in Massachusetts for pretty much the rest, with side trips to Paris and California. I came of age during this time and spent the Summer of Love in Yorkville rather than Haight Ashbury, but I could still relate as the Owens siblings took their own fledgling steps into adulthood. It doesn't matter when you grew up for you to appreciate their journey, but for me the news events in the background really took me back in time. The Civil Rights Movement, the Stonewall Riots, Vietnam, the Summer of Love, the Monterey Pop Festival.
The siblings are Franny, who can talk to birds, Bridget (Jet), who can read thoughts, and Vincent, who is too handsome and charming for his own good. Their parents know that their children are different, and know the difficulties the three will face because of a family curse, so they've laid down a strict set of rules to live by: no walking in the moonlight, no books about magic, no candles, no crows, and most importantly, never fall in love.
By a third of the way through the book, the kids have broken all the rules and then must learn to live with the consequences.
I could go on and on about how much I love this book. It's sweet, funny, heartbreaking, and uplifting. Mostly it's magic--the magic of the characters and the story, but also Hoffman's prose.
As soon as I finished The Rules of Magic , I pulled out my old copy of Practical Magic so that I could stay a little longer in this wonderful world that Hoffman has created.
Highly recommended.
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Hoffman, Alice. "The Rules of Magic." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, vol. 134, no. 3-4, Mar.-Apr. 2018, pp. 74+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A534488209/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d601a9af. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
In Alice Hoffman's 1995 novel, Practical Magic, sisters Sally and Gillian share a strong sibling bond and a complicated relationship with magic. Their story is rooted in family history and a legend that includes witchcraft, feuds and rejection dating back 200 years.
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In The Rules of Magic, Hoffman's prequel to Practical Magic, we learn about the family's more recent history: the backstory of Aunt Frances and Aunt Jet, Sally and Gillian's mysterious guardians. Young Franny is redheaded and feisty; she loves science and looks for logical explanations for everything, even their bizarre family traits that can't be explained. Bridget, called Jet, is shy and so beautiful that boys are literally willing to die to be with her. Their brother, Vincent, is a mysterious heartbreaker, tormented by visions of the future and carrying more secrets than his sisters can imagine. The three siblings are tied together by blood, magic and a curse that dooms any romantic partner they ever love.
Their story is set in the 1960s, and Hoffman weaves cultural and historical references into the novel. It's the summer solstice meets the "Summer of Love"; spells and potions and superstition rub elbows with riots and music festivals and bellbottoms. Hoffman handles this commingling beautifully, and the fact that her fantasy is grounded in reality makes it feel grittier and more tangible.
The Rules of Magic fills in the blanks for Practical Magic fans, but it works perfectly as a standalone as well. It's clear why Hoffman is a favorite for fantasy readers: She creates interesting mythologies; she's able to weave magic into the modern world; and she alludes to the magical properties of herbs and everyday items without over-explaining them and overcomplicating her narratives.
The Rules of Magic is ostensibly about three family members who find all their love stories star-crossed. But the devotion that draws them together as a family forms a bond that proves indestructible and may ultimately be the key to finally breaking the curse that's haunted their family for generations.
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Rollwagen, Carrie. "The Rules of Magic." BookPage, Oct. 2017, pp. 22+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A507825813/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a13908a5. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
THE RULES OF MAGICBy Alice Hoffman367 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.99.
Novels flow from Alice Hoffman with the reliability of leaves falling in autumn. Since her first, ''Property Of,'' published in 1977 when she was 25, Hoffman has averaged a book a year -- more than 30 novels, three collections of short fiction and eight books for children and young adults.
But Hoffman's latest offering, ''The Rules of Magic,'' is likely to attract particular attention because it's a prequel to her 1995 novel, ''Practical Magic,'' perhaps the best-known work of her career and the basis for the 1998 film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as the sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, born into a Massachusetts family whose founding matriarch escaped Salem's gallows by magicking herself out of her noose. People who know only the film version may be surprised to learn that ''the aunts,'' as Sally and Gillian refer to their guardians, are thinly sketched characters for most of ''Practical Magic.'' Though they're described as part of a long line of beautiful Owens women with gray eyes and an intrinsic understanding of how plants (and animal organs) can cure various ailments (principally lovesickness), most of what readers learn about the older sisters borders on witchy caricature: They're peculiar and reclusive, with long white hair and crooked spines. Readers don't even know their names -- Frances, called Franny, and Bridget, known as Jet -- until late in that novel's last act.
Hoffman has now returned to fill out their portraits, providing a back story that thoroughly upends what we thought we knew about them. The Owens sisters had a baby brother! The only male Owens in centuries was the third child of Susanna, an Owens who skedaddled out of Massachusetts as soon as she could, desperate to remove herself from the stigma clinging to her family name.
She flees Boston for Paris, then settles in New York, where she and her psychiatrist husband (a real drip) try without success to repress any inclinations toward witchcraft their children might harbor. The house rules are all about prohibition: ''No walking in the moonlight, no Ouija boards, no candles, no red shoes, no wearing black, no going shoeless, no amulets, no night-blooming flowers, no reading novels about magic, no cats, no crows and no venturing below 14th Street.''
Firstborn Franny, pale as porcelain, with ''blood-red'' hair and ''an ability to commune with birds,'' mostly abides by those rules, as does the shy beauty, Jet, whose knack for reading people's thoughts allows her to skirt a lot of missteps. But Vincent, so charismatic even as a newborn that a nurse tried to spirit him out of the hospital hidden inside her coat, is not yet a teenager before he's south of 14th Street, strumming his guitar on street corners in Greenwich Village as the 1960s dawn.
The children live uncomfortably in their skins until Franny turns 17 and, in accordance with generations of tradition, is summoned to spend the summer at the family manor, where the current matriarch is Aunt Isabelle. For narrative convenience, Franny's siblings travel with her. And all their mother's carefully concocted strictures unravel in a single vacation. From Isabelle, the siblings learn to make black soap and which herbs will cause a married man to leave his wife. More dramatically, from their rebellious cousin April they learn about the curse laid on the family by Maria Owens, who escaped hanging but was spurned by her paramour: Any man who loves an Owens is doomed. Talk about your summers of transformation. What teenager wants to fall in love if it means your lover dies?
It's tough to top a dead body in a car, the event that drove the plot in ''Practical Magic,'' and Hoffman doesn't try. Instead she goes for historical sweep, setting the Owens siblings' saga against the backdrop of real events like the Vietnam War, San Francisco's Summer of Love and the Stonewall riots. But this is a novel that begins with the words, ''Once upon a time,'' and its strength is a Hoffman hallmark: the commingling of fairy-tale promise with real-life struggle. The Owens children can't escape who they are. Like the rest of us, they have to figure out the best way to put their powers to use.
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PHOTO: Alice Hoffman (PHOTOGRAPH BY DEBORAH FEINGOLD)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
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Corbett, Sue. "Bewitched." The New York Times Book Review, 29 Oct. 2017, p. 9(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A511892277/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9611b123. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Alice Hoffman sold her first novel, Property Of, when she was 21 years old. This November, she publishes her 25th, Faithful (Simon & Schuster). At 64, she's been writing and publishing books for over four decades. She has also published one work of nonfiction and nine young adult novels. "It's not that I write so much," Hoffman says. "I've just been doing it for a long time, and I've always thought of [writing] as what I do." Hoffman does it well and with popular appeal. Here on Earth, her retelling of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, was an Oprah Book Club Pick in March 1998. Practical Magic, about a family of witches, The River King, about a suicide that may have been a fraternity hazing gone wrong, and Aquamarine, a teen-oriented comedy, were made into movies. And a TV miniseries based on The Dovekeepers, about four women in 70 C.E. at Masada, aired on CBS last year.
Tucked away in a corner booth at Henrietta's Table in Cambridge, Mass., after the power breakfasters have gone, Hoffman talks about her writing in general and Faithful in particular. Her work always seems so personal, addressing the reader directly. In part, Hoffman explains, that's because she sprinkles in snippets from her life. The characters in Faithful visit her two favorite bookstores--the Strand in New York City and the Book Revue in Huntington, N.Y. They even mention her favorite books, including Andrew Lang's color-coded series of fairy tales and the Misty of Chicoteague series. For Hoffman, it's all about making the fictional world more real for her readers.
Hoffman frequently goes back and forth between writing novels rooted in historical events--like her 2015 release, The Marriage of Opposites, which is set in the 19th century and tells the story of the wife of artist Camille Pissarro--and current fiction. Faithful begins on Long Island two years after a car accident in which Shelby, then a high school senior, spun out on the ice. Both she and her best friend, Helene, also a senior, were flung from the car, and Helene ended up in a years-long coma. Though Shelby was unhurt physically, it affected her in other ways.
The story follows Shelby from a psych ward to her parents' basement to New York City. There she takes a job in a pet store and slowly begins to rebuild her life with encouragement from an unknown person who sends her postcards, and from a new friend, Maravelle, who also works at the pet store, and Maravelle's three children.
Like Shelby, Hoffman grew up on Long Island, has an apartment in New York City, and is a survivor. A main theme of Faithful is survivor's guilt, something Hoffman has lived with for a long time. "I think I'm always writing about survivors; I'm a breast cancer survivor," says Hoffman, who found a lump in her breast when she was 45. "Half of all people with breast cancer die." The Hoffman Breast Center at Mount Auburn Hospital, less than a mile from where we talk, is named for her. She donated advances from a collection of stories, Local Girl, and for her book on breast cancer, The Survival Guide.
Long before her cancer diagnosis, though, Hoffman was aware of survivor's guilt. "As a kid, my life was changed by reading the diary of Anne Frank and how she got through," Hoffman says. "Ultimately, of course, she didn't live."
But Hoffman is quick to dispel the notion that her books are autobiographical. "I'm not really writing about myself but the books are all somehow related not to my lived life, but to my inner life." Before she begins writing a book, Hoffman says, she usually starts with an idea or a story. She finds out where the story wants to go by writing the first draft quickly, without going back to make any corrections. Those she leaves for later drafts.
Hoffman revises her work many times before it's published. "When I'm writing, what I really want someone to do is have an emotional experience," she says. "That's what I want as a writer." She acknowledges that she did in fact cry, "a lot," while she worked on Faithful. She spent a number of years on the novel and worked on it at the same time as The Dovekeepers, which was published in 2011.
At its most basic level, Faithful is a coming-of-age story about Shelby. But in the process of writing about her transformation from a "skinny bald girl in big boots" who is filled with self-hatred, Hoffman explored what it is to be faithful. She doesn't use the term to mean steadfast in a religious sense, although Shelby believes she was rescued by an angel after the accident. Being faithful, in the context of the book, has more to do with the bond between Shelby and her mother, Sue, who is fiercely loyal to and protective of her daughter, whom she loves unequivocally. That bond, Hoffman says, is similar to the one she had with her own mother.
The novel also describes the deep connection that can develop between people and their pets. Over the course of the book, Shelby rescues three dogs and a cat, which she gives away. Arguably the dogs, which she keeps, rescue her. "When you rescue [something], you don't feel as much of a victim," Hoffman says. Having Shelby steal pets from people who mistreat them also gives Hoffman a fictional opportunity to do something she wishes that she had done in real life: rescuing the pets of homeless people begging for money in Harvard Square. The animals, which are often drugged, are simply props to gain sympathy, she says.
But ultimately Faithful is about Shelby's guilt. "It's about forgiving herself for driving," Hoffman says. "For me the book is very positive. It's funny." It will also appeal to young readers. The coming-of-age of a teenage girl who suffers a breakdown, is sexually assaulted, and smokes pot falls well within the scope of YA. This past summer, when Hoffman tested the book on her students at Adelphi University, where she teaches high school juniors as part of the Alice Hoffman Writing Retreat, they read the galleys overnight.
Despite her students' enthusiasm for the book, Hoffman doesn't regard Faithful as YA. "I think my readership is very weird," she says. "It's eight to 80." She views Faithful as an adult title that teens can enjoy and that mothers and daughters can read together.
Nor does Hoffman consider Faithful--or any of her work, for that matter--an example of magical realism. That's a term that she would like to decouple from her name. "[Magical realism] is a new term for an old thing," she says. "The whole art of writing is magical." Instead Hoffman prefers to view her writing in terms of the literature of symbolic fairy tales and folktales. In Faithful, she says, she's trying to give an account of a young girl's life in a way that more closely mimics journalism. The miracles that are attributed to Helene after the accident, like the candles that burn hours beyond what is possible on the anniversary of the crash, or her ability to heal the sick, are all part of that old-fashioned storytelling.
In one of the book's many beautiful passages, Shelby is sitting in the backyard on the picnic table and thinking about the fairy tales that she read to her mother after Sue became sick. Hoffman writes that as Shelby read, she and her mother "became lost in an enchanted cottage with vines growing over the window. It was dark and it was quiet and they could hear each other softy breathing. Every story had the same message: What was deep inside could only be deciphered by someone who understood."
The magic of the story could be one reason people who read early copies of the novel have responded in a "deep, emotional way," Hoffman says--which she hadn't expected. That's despite the fact that she herself was particularly drawn to Shelby, whom she describes as both very funny and a pain in the ass. "Shelby starts out so tough, but she's not tough," Hoffman says. "She's very endearing."
Hoffman's not a writer who looks back. She saves all her drafts, but she doesn't reread them once a book is finished. So she's particularly excited to have emptied an entire room of manuscripts and foreign editions by donating her literary papers to Adelphi last year. Hoffman also doesn't write sequels, but she has found a fitting way to continue writing about Shelby, at least on social media.
Before we leave, Hoffman pulls out her phone to show me a picture of her sheepdog, Shelby, who has her own account on Instagram (@mizindependentshelby). Shelby the sheepdog can also be spotted on Facebook, where, in a nod to yoga, you can see her in a mean Upward-Facing Dog.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
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Rosen, Judith. "Surviving: Alice Hoffman's 25th novel, Faithful, confronts coming-of-age and coming together." Publishers Weekly, vol. 263, no. 42, 17 Oct. 2016, pp. 42+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A468699995/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fca389e0. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
FAITHFUL
By Alice Hoffman
Simon & Schuster
$26, 272 pages
ISBN 9781476799209
Audio, eBook available
Some people can point to a moment that defined their lives. It could be a moment when a metaphorical light bulb became lit and an idea made sense or when an action literally changed a life's course. Whatever the circumstances, that moment was the impetus for everything that followed.
Shelby Richmond is one of those people. She was behind the wheel when a car accident left her best friend in a vegetative state. In that moment, Shelby is transformed from a popular, carefree good girl into a loner who believes the world would be better off without her presence.
In Faithful, bestselling novelist Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic, The Dovekeepers) traces Shelby's metamorphosis from a teenage girl who hides from the world to a young woman who believes her life might be worthwhile, after all.
Hoffman's prose is engaging, but Shelby's path is neither quick nor easy. In the months after the accident, Shelby holes up in her mother's basement. She can't stand the hoopla that now surrounds her best friend, Helene. Crowds gather outside Helene's home, and people believe they may be granted a miracle by touching the comatose girl's hand. Although she has the option of moving, dreaming, living, Shelby feels nearly as stuck as her best friend, until a series of cryptic postcards begin to show up at her door.
Faithful is a deep dive into grief and its lingering effects, a mas- terful character study of a young woman reassembling her life, one moment at a time.-CARLA JEAN WHITELY
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 BookPage
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Whitley, Carla Jean. "Faithful." BookPage, Nov. 2016, pp. 35+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A469503130/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=91f954f1. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
FAITHFULBy Alice Hoffman258 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.
When we first meet young Shelby Richmond, the heroine of Alice Hoffman's latest novel, she's a wounded soul living in self-imposed exile in suburban Long Island. Shelby, we learn, holds herself responsible for a car crash that nearly killed her best friend. After a guilt-fueled suicide attempt and a stay in a mental ward, she now lives in her parents' basement, venturing out only to meet with Ben, her softhearted, Vonnegut-reading pot dealer. When the love-struck Ben persuades Shelby to move with him to New York City, the path to her inevitable redemption begins.
''Does no one else see all this pain floating around Manhattan?'' Shelby wonders in one of her more solipsistic moments. What's most vexing about ''Faithful'' is that you're supposed to feel like a monster if you laugh. Hoffman builds Shelby out of trauma and not much else, and her observations suffer from a certain clichéd vagueness. Through Shelby, we learn that ''feelings are best left concealed,'' that ''she doesn't even think it's possible for her to smile'' and, most egregiously, that ''it's true, tragedy can bring you closer or drive you apart.'' Hoffman might be making a point about the banality of heartbreak, but it's lost in the actual banality.
Thankfully, once in Manhattan, Shelby begins to accrue detail and personality. She finds work at a pet store, fills her apartment with rescued dogs and eats nothing but Chinese takeout. She befriends a co-worker, Maravelle, as well as Maravelle's three skeptical and defiant kids. Hoffman adds a few of her trademark magic-realist touches, though they're lighter here than in previous books like ''Practical Magic'' and ''The Probable Future.'' Shelby's best friend, now comatose, is said to have healing powers, and pilgrims crowd her bedroom to touch her hand. Someone keeps sending Shelby postcards inscribed with messages like ''Say something,'' ''Do something,'' ''Want something.'' Each, of course, is exactly what she needs to hear.
But mostly the magic lies in a lack of real-world consequences for Shelby's more reckless lurches toward self-actualization. She confronts the man who's been stalking Maravelle's daughter in a manner that ought to get her killed, but she escapes with a pop on the nose. When she liberates a menacing ''monster'' dog from its junkyard captivity, it's tamed in an instant, as smitten with Shelby as we're meant to be.
''Faithful'' is most successful when describing the everyday details and habits of Manhattan: the supervisor who runs the pet store ''as if it's a small, corrupt country,'' the takeout deliveryman ''who always seems in the grip of some great and quiet sorrow.'' If you can hang up your disbelief and surrender to the soft-focus glow, the book becomes enjoyable, satisfying even, as the mystery of the postcards is solved and the catharses arrive right on schedule. In the end, it feels as harmlessly saccharine as an after-dinner mint, with one exception -- the disclosure, early in the book, that when Shelby was in the mental hospital she was raped repeatedly by an orderly. It's a terrible choice on Hoffman's part, seemingly made only to increase Shelby's misery. As though Hoffman realizes she's overreached by adding this dark twist, it's mentioned again only a handful of times before it vanishes like a bad dream. One wonders why it wasn't edited out completely. It's the only truly jarring misstep in this feel-good confection of mystical postcards and amiable one-eyed dogs, in which every tragedy ends in uplift and you can see the grace coming for miles.
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DRAWING (DRAWING BY FELICITY MARSHALL)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
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Wecker, Helene. "The Road Back." The New York Times Book Review, 20 Nov. 2016, p. 22(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A470751567/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=aeb175c1. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice THE MARRIAGE OF OPPOSITES Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $27.95 8, 4 ISBN: 978-1-4516-9359-1
A ghost wife, a stolen child, wandering eyes, hidden ledgers--and more--bind the 19th-century Jewish community on a paradisiacal island in the West Indies.To this marvelous mise-en-scene, Hoffman (The Museum of Extraordinary Things, 2014, etc.) adds a historical character: Rachel Manzana Pomie, the Creole mother of impressionist painter Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro. Descended from Spanish and Portuguese Jews who "knew when to depart even when it meant leaving worldly goods behind," Hoffman's Rachel nurses a grudge as bitter as the fruit of the apple tree her grandparents toted to the Antilles when they fled France: that her mother, Mme. Pomie, favors the nephew she adopted as a baby over her own child. "Girls were not worth very much in her eyes, especially a disobedient girl." With her friend Jestine--the mixed-blood child of the family cook--Rachel keeps a lookout for turtle girls (mermaids with shells) and, aping the French fabulist Charles Perrault, chats up the market women for "small miracles common only in our country" to tell when she finally gets to Paris. "My mother didn't like this sort of talk; people of our faith didn't believe in past lives or spirits." Faith leaves Rachel as well when her father arranges a match to a business associate twice her age, who dies, trapping her on the island with seven children; she's shunned by her synagogue when she falls into bed with a young relative of her late husband who arrives from Paris to settle the books: "The good man and the enchantress. Some people said I was made of molasses; one bite and you couldn't get enough." Wearing "haint blue" to chase ghosts won't bring back the luck she gave away to her old friend Jestine when she needed it. But her youngest, Jacobo, whose sketches and open manner charm even tight-lipped members of the synagogue's sisterhood, just might. Lilting prose, beautifully meted out folklore and historical references, and Hoffman's deep conviction in her characters (especially those "willing to do anything for love") make reading this "contes du temps passe" a total pleasure.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Hoffman, Alice: THE MARRIAGE OF OPPOSITES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2015. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A415493978/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f37d1da5. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
THE MARRIAGE OF OPPOSITES
By Alice Hoffman
Simon & Schuster
$27.99, 384 pages
ISBN 9781451693591
Audio, eBook available
HISTORICAL FICTION
Atmospheric, moody and evocative--these words describe Alice Hoffman's latest achievement, The Marriage of Opposites. And that is no accident, because they also accurately describe the 19th-century artistic movement known as Impressionism, founded by Camille Pissarro, the third son Rachel Pomie bore to her second husband, Frederick. (Altogether, Rachel had nine children, an accomplishment for any heroine, but Rachel is a strong character.)
Hoffman tells the story of the painter's life through the drama of his mother's concerns. The story takes place first on the island of St. Thomas, where Rachel is caught up in the drama of her scandalous second marriage and the troubles facing her best friend, Jestine.
Later, the family (or some of it) returns to their home country of France, a long-held dream for these French-Jewish exiles.
One would think that after 30-odd books, Hoffman might have exhausted her glossary, but The Marriage of Opposites is a treasure trove of expression, color on color and emotion on emotion. Fittingly for a book about an artist, color is never far from the spotlight. Pissarro is "greedy for all the color in the world," and remembers November on the island, when "the dusk sifted down like black powder." Nature claims its fair share of the vocabulary--trees and birds and hills--and Hoffman seems always up to the task of freshly describing the latest artistic excitement.
Doing justice to the individuals in her tale is harder to accomplish--being real people, they must be unmistakably specific, sometimes in off-putting ways. Still, somehow Hoffman manages this as well, spinning a fresh tale of human error and achievement. This subject has found the right author at the right time, and no one who reads this story will forget it.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
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McDaniel, Maude. "The Marriage of Opposites." BookPage, Aug. 2015, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A422447676/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=767350ed. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
THE MARRIAGE OF OPPOSITES
By Alice Hoffman
369 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.99.
For a period of her young life, Virginia Woolf wrote while standing at an elevated desk poised near her sister Vanessa's easel. The writing table's curious height enabled Virginia to peer at the world from the same viewpoint as her artist sister, to witness all at once the world itself, the world transcribed in ink and the world brushed onto a canvas. Later, when Woolf created the character of the painter Lily Briscoe in ''To the Lighthouse,'' she knew the mix of delicacy and passion that collide to create a great work, and she was schooled in the fine craft of transforming daubs of paint into strings of words.
''The Marriage of Opposites'' -- which is based on the life of the renowned Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro and the story of his parents' unlikely romance and marriage -- is deeply concerned with the development of an artist and his work, and the familial experiences that shape an artist's vision. In that particular way, it's not unlike ''To the Lighthouse.'' But although Alice Hoffman sketches an intriguing protagonist, her predilection for her own dreamy, moody landscape design overwhelms the narrative, as if to distract us from its stretched, disintegrating form. ''The Marriage of Opposites'' is a riot of color and fever, entirely obsessed with the passion of an artist but devoid of the sense of delicacy.
Born at the turn of the 19th century on the island of St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies -- a place of ''fragrant and heavy'' air, and heat so extreme it causes French ladies to faint ''moments after disembarking'' -- Pissarro's mother, Rachel Pomi, lives in a palm-shaded, vine-tangled, wicked fairy tale. She is the only living child of a kindly shipping merchant who allows her free rein in his map-filled library, and a harsh, unforgiving mother whose dissatisfaction continually reaches new heights. Young Rachel is a type -- the neglected child who immerses herself in literature to avoid her sad home life -- but a compelling one.
As Rachel yearns to leave behind island life and cross the sea to Paris, her dreams of long boulevards and shady jardins evaporate when her father informs her of her engagement to Isaac Petit, a fellow Jewish merchant. Rachel inherits Isaac's three young children in the marriage, but Isaac dies six years later. Shortly thereafter, despite the salty glares of townspeople and condemnation from the Jewish community, Rachel beds, falls for and marries Isaac's nephew Frdric, who has been sent from Paris to settle his uncle's affairs. As Rachel not so slyly notes, after the marriage, ''We didn't leave our chamber for 12 hours.'' This is decidedly not a marriage of convenience, and Hoffman's writing is most adroit as she traces the psychological upheaval that accompanies morally and religiously forbidden love.
Camille is the third child of this against-all-odds union, and much of the second half of the novel concerns his development from fidgety schoolboy to daring, misunderstood en plein air master. But at precisely the halfway mark, when the novel might have turned into a vibrant portrait of an artist as a young man, it careens into a tirade of maternal anger. Rachel, a woman so unconventional she married her deceased husband's nephew and so daring she petitioned the Grand Rabbi of Denmark to ask his blessing for the marriage, transforms without cause into a caricature of the disappointed parent, displeased that her child has chosen a creative rather than practical career. She mocks his aspirations, sneers at his work and even whips out the eternally guilt-inducing ''Did you know it took three days for you to be born?''
This absurd, unfounded anger at Camille consumes Rachel's life -- and in turn the rest of the novel. It's a bizarre and wholly unbelievable alteration; Rachel's feelings may stem from her own thwarted ambitions, but they're never properly explored by either her or Hoffman. Every opportunity for complexity is discarded in favor of flat and baseless bitterness. Frdric and Rachel's other children melt away. A fascinating side story of a mixed-race child's abduction by her white father is neglected. The complications of mothering a genius are fertile ground, yet Hoffman tills the same spot over and over until it yields only shriveled and wizened crops.
Where is Camille -- the man whom Czanne called a father and Gauguin considered a master -- in all of this? What did he see when he peered over his easel onto the dusty roads of St. Thomas and then the verdant alles of rural France? It's hard to say. ''The Marriage of Opposites'' is so intoxicated by its protagonist's bitter scent that it fails to notice the artistic genius blooming among its undergrowth.
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By HILLARY KELLY
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Kelly, Hillary. "Mother's Disapproval." The New York Times Book Review, 16 Aug. 2015, p. 14(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A425503855/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1d330726. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Nightbird, by Alice Hoffman, Wendy Lamb Books/Random House, 2015, $16.99.
I USED TO GET a little flummoxed when asked to name my favorite author because there are so many great writers that it's hard to pick only one. And frankly, it often depends on my mood at the time I'm being asked. If I'm looking for secondary-world fantasy, well, I can't go wrong with Patricia McKillip. Hardboiled mystery? Andrew Vachss is my man. A little urban fantasy? Hello, Patricia Briggs. Something classic? Robert Nathan.
I could go on.
But the people asking usually don't want a list. They want one name. So after giving it some thought, I decided I should go with an author who's never disappointed me. Who, in fact, has written more perfect books than pretty much anyone else I can think of--you know, those books where you wouldn't change a word because everything about the story is just right? Most writers are lucky to get one of those in a career.
So now when I get asked, I just say Alice Hoffman.
No, she's not my actual favorite (see above), but she comes pretty darn close, and Nightbird' s as good an example why as anything else she's written, because it's another one of those perfect books.
At least it is for me. I'll allow that all art is subjective but, nevertheless, I'll stick to that description.
Nightbird' s being marketed as a middle-grade book--ages ten and up, in case you're wondering--but I think of it as more of a timeless tale. There's no sex, violence, or swearing, but you know, if an author can get her readers to invest themselves in the characters and their story, that lack is pretty much irrelevant. Too many books--regardless of the age to which they're being marketed--forget that and let "edginess" be the selling point.
Edgy is only good if it has the characters and story to back it up. It shouldn't be the reason one reads a book. A sense of wonder, however, is an entirely different thing, and Nightbird has that from its opening lines:
You can't believe everything
you hear, not even in
Sidwell, Massachusetts, where
every person is said to tell the
truth and the apples are so
sweet people come from as far
away as New York City during
the apple festival. There
are rumors that a mysterious
creature lives in our town.
Some people insist it's a bird
bigger than an eagle; others
say it's a dragon, or an oversized
bat that resembles a person.
...
The mysterious creature is, in fact, Twig Fowler's brother James. When the Fowler family returns to the family home from New York City, they come back at night so that no one can see the boy with the wings that is Twig's brother. The Fowler family live under a curse laid upon them two hundred years ago by the witch Agnes Early. Their mother makes sure they live their lives "in the corners of everyday life," where they can be unnoticed, because if the world ever found out about James, living in the attic....
But then new neighbors move in next door--just an orchard away from their house. Worse, they are descendants of the Earlys. The family seems pleasant: a doctor and his wife with two daughters, one Twig's age, the other the same age as James.
Their mother forbids the kids to have anything to do with the new family, but for the first time the Fowler children disobey. Twig becomes best friends with Julie. James and the older girl fall in love.
And then it seems inevitable that the tragic events of the past that set the curse in motion are about to be repeated all over again.
Nightbird is set in contemporary times but it reads like a timeless fairy tale. The prose is a little simpler than in Hoffman's adult novels, and that simplicity enhances its lyric flow. But unlike fairy tales, which are often distilled down to only their sense of wonder, Nightbird is rich in motive, deep in characterization.
It's a charming book, which in this age with its fascination with post-apocalyptic worlds, zombies, and the like, might seem like a disparaging remark. But if you like Jane Yolen's fables, or Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, you will not be disappointed with the magic that Hoffman has brought to the page here.
Highly recommended for any age.
de Lint, Charles
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Spilogale, Inc.
http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/
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"Nightbird." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, vol. 128, no. 5-6, May-June 2015, pp. 55+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A412685844/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9f79b6f8. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
NIGHTBIRD
By Alice Hoffman
199 pp. Wendy Lamb Books. $16.99. (Middle grade; ages 8 to 12)
Alice Hoffman's latest book comes loaded with enchantments. Some are explicitly fantastical: a curse from a brokenhearted witch with real-world consequences, a winged boy who learns the language of birds. But some of the magic is of a subtler kind -- hours that seem to mysteriously vanish in shared conversation, loneliness transformed by the alchemy of new friendship.
''Nightbird'' takes place in Sidwell, a fictional Massachusetts town known for a special variety of apples called Pink, black owls and a Mothman-like monster frequently spotted above its rooftops. A young girl named Twig must navigate the secret spaces between daily life in Sidwell and the magic at the heart of its local legends. She is a Fowler, the youngest child of a family cursed long ago by Agnes Early, the Witch of Sidwell. For 200 years, every Fowler son has been born with wings, and so Twig is forced to keep the secret of her handsome older brother, James, who is confined to the attic by day, but takes to the skies and freedom once the sun goes down. In an attempt to keep unwanted attention from James, Twig and her mother have thoroughly isolated themselves, turning down invitations and earning a reputation as snobs and eccentrics. But a series of thefts and cryptic graffiti scrawled around Sidwell have left the townspeople jumpy and wondering if the monster is more dangerous nuisance than benign tourist draw. Things are further complicated when descendants of the Witch of Sidwell return to occupy the rundown cottage next to Twig's home, and the destinies of the Fowlers and the Earlys become entangled once more. As friendship blooms between Twig and Julia Early and a romance develops between James and Julia's sister, Agate, they set out to solve the mystery of the minor crimes plaguing their town, and at the same time find a way to undo the curse so that James can live a normal life with the girl he loves.
Hoffman has a beautiful way of throwing open a door on possibility so that the reader begins to see magic everywhere. A drought that devours every lake but one may be unfortunate weather or the work of a witch. A recipe for Pink apple pie, passed down from mother to daughter, takes on the quality of incantation. When Twig sits down for a cup of tea with the town historian, she tells us: ''After I took a few sips, I felt a funny tingle in my throat. It almost felt as if something had been unlocked inside me.'' Is there magic in Miss Larch's black orchid brew? Or are the comfort of ritual and our need to confide in one another enough to compel us to speak the truth?
Hoffman casts her spell over Sidwell too. It is a place out of time. There are no signs of cellphones or texting, no Google searches or Wikipedia. Research must be done in libraries or by speaking to friendly adults who are almost uniformly helpful if occasionally prone to talking in riddles. Sidwell seems gentler than the settings of Hoffman's works for adults, but still buzzes with charm and mystery: Groups of gossiping men gather at the hardware store, sweet-smelling orchards burst with apples and lush woods -- the nesting place of tiny black owls -- offer solace or scares depending on which way the light falls. Twig's internal landscape is illuminated with equal beauty: ''I just stored up my hurts,'' she says, ''as if they were a tower made of fallen stars.'' Her loneliness is lyrical but grounded in moments of acute honesty.
At times, though, the enchantment wavers. The coincidences of found diaries and scraps of paper seem less fated than convenient. Deep familial rifts are healed seemingly without scars, and characters make abrupt emotional leaps that jar after the story's steady buildup. The actual mechanics of the curse afflicting the Fowlers is also oddly tame for the transformations that result. This is a surprise from Hoffman, who excels at delineating the sacrifices -- small and large -- that magic demands. Readers acclimated to its costs and repercussions in series like His Dark Materials or Harry Potter may be less convinced by what ''Nightbird's'' characters accomplish with herbs, rose petals and clarity of intent.
The world of Sidwell is one of quiet sorcery. Power can be found not just in the crackle of summer lightning but in ritualistic and common chores -- the planting of a garden, the making of a proper pie crust. Hoffman reminds us that there are secrets everywhere, and in these moments of unexpected discovery, ''Nightbird'' soars.
By LEIGH BARDUGO
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Bardugo, Leigh. "Steeped in Enchantment." The New York Times Book Review, 12 Apr. 2015, p. 19(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A409316206/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=56219158. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice. Nightbird. Wendy Lamb/ Random House, 2015. 208p. $16.99. 978-0385-38958-7.
After the death of her grandparents, twelve-year-old Twig Fowler, older brother James, and mother Sophie have returned from New York City to tend the family apple orchard in rural Massachusetts. The Fowler family settled here before the Revolution, and Hoffman deftly reveals the curse plaguing its male offspring ever since. The curse leaves Sophie and Twig isolated, but to James, it offers the freedom only feathers can bring--until he falls in love with Agate Early Hall, a contemporary version of Agnes Early, who invoked the curse two centuries ago. Sophie forbids her children to go near the two sisters who offer them friendship and hope, a proscription neither James nor Twig obeys. There is also a subplot in which wealthy summer residents try to sell the woods to developers. Further, there is an appealing cast of characters fighting to save endangered owls living in the woods. Topped off with villagers hunting for the Sidwell Monster (James on the wing?), and this novel is a recipe for a page-turning plot.
The conclusion may be too cheerful for sophisticated readers, and Twig is wise and eloquent beyond her twelve years. At times, the narrative voice is that of a gifted writer who knows how to work magic with language rather than the voice of an awkward tween. It is, nevertheless, a delight to accept this transgression in voice and satisfying to witness how Twig becomes Teresa and her family transcends its past to build a brighter future.--Donna L. Phillips.
Phillips, Donna L.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC
http://www.voya.com
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Phillips, Donna L. "Hoffman, Alice. Nightbird." Voice of Youth Advocates, vol. 37, no. 6, Feb. 2015, pp. 77+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A402738710/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=26cea440. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice THE MUSEUM OF EXTRAORDINARY THINGS Scribner (Adult Fiction) $27.99 2, 25 ISBN: 978-1-4516-9356-0
A young woman grows up in her father's eponymous Coney Island museum at the turn of the 20th century in Hoffman's (The Dovekeepers, 2011, etc.) novel. Watched over by her beloved but acid-scarred family housekeeper, motherless Coralie lives a seemingly idyllic early childhood with her intellectual father above the "museum" he runs but doesn't let her visit. Then, on Coralie's 10th birthday, in 1903, her father not only escorts her through the exhibit for the first time, but he also puts her on display as "The Human Mermaid." Born with webbed fingers, Coralie, an expert swimmer, spends her days in a tank wearing her mermaid suit. At first, she loves the work, in what her father staunchly denies is a freak show, and becomes close to other members of the exhibition, particularly the "Wolfman," with whom Coralie's housekeeper falls in love. But as business flags, her father arranges special showings, during which adolescent Coralie must swim naked for invited male audiences. By 1911, her father, a Fagin-like villain who hopes to milk rumored sightings of a sea monster, sends Coralie into New York's waters at odd hours disguised as the monster. On one of her nightly swims, Coralie comes ashore, discovers a young man with a camera at a campfire and is instantly smitten. Eddie Cohen, the son of an Orthodox Jew, has left behind his ethnic and spiritual roots to become a photographer. Motherless like Coralie, Eddie has also been employed in phony magic, in his case, finding missing persons for a fake seer. Their love affair and Coralie's rebellion against her father play out in a changing New York City as seen through Eddie's photographic lens. Hoffman displays an obvious affection for the city, as well as for those society would deem freaks, but readers looking for an evocative, magical take on the immigrant experience would be better served by Helene Wecker's The Golem and Jinni (2013).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Hoffman, Alice: THE MUSEUM OF EXTRAORDINARY THINGS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2014, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A357032829/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=13faa58f. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
The author of ''The Museum of Extraordinary Things'' found a copy of ''The Catcher in the Rye'' on her mother's bookshelf. ''I hadn't known that a book could speak so directly to a reader.''
What books are currently on your night stand?
''Time and Again,'' by Jack Finney, which I missed in the '70s and just discovered -- I am a huge fan of all time travel. ''Inside the Dream Palace,'' by Sherill Tippins, the history of the Chelsea Hotel, since I'm a Chelsea girl. ''The Death of Bees,'' by Lisa O'Donnell, a dark, fierce first novel that is a page-turner and a fairy tale turned inside out. I can't wait to read what she writes next.
Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today?
All time -- Emily Bront, author of the greatest psychological novel ever written, with the most complex character ever conceived. Read ''Wuthering Heights'' when you're 18 and you think Heathcliff is a romantic hero; when you're 30, he's a monster; at 50 you see he's just human. My favorite novelist working today is our greatest living writer, Toni Morrison. Nothing compares with her lyrical, heart-wrenching, gorgeous prose.
Sell us on your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer.
Penelope Lively, the wonderful English writer born in Egypt. I love everything she writes: novels, children's books, nonfiction. She has such grace, and her characters have true depth. ''Moon Tiger,'' the first of her novels I read, is a favorite, along with some of her recent books, ''How It All Began'' and ''The Photograph,'' luminous, intelligent fictional worlds, often centering on a character who is searching back through her own history to find out why her life played out as it did. Emotional mysteries, the best kind.
What are your literary guilty pleasures? Do you have a favorite genre?
I have no guilt regarding my love of fantasy and science fiction, only pleasure. I grew up reading the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I chuckle over how this ''genre'' has become mainstream and how time travel, alternative universes and magic are now so everyday. Plus, no one could ever feel guilty about reading writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick.
Which books might we be surprised to find on your shelves.
Lots of nonfiction research. Texts concerning weather, apples, New York City, archaeology, medicine, trees, stars, Roman history, photography.
What was the last book to make you laugh?
Nora Ephron's ''I Remember Nothing.''
The last book that made you cry?
Nora Ephron's ''I Remember Nothing.''
The last book that made you furious?
Oh, no book makes me furious. Maybe sad, or lost, or confused, but mostly joy and wonder are the emotions involved. That's why I prefer books to people.
What kind of reader were you as a child? And what were your favorite childhood books?
I was a fanatical escapist reader, as I am now a fanatical escapist writer. I always had a book with me, no matter what, on the bus, in line for the movies. I still love to read the same books I loved as a child. Anything written by Edward Eager, especially ''Half Magic''; the Borrowers series; ''Mary Poppins.'' Grimms' fairy tales, so psychologically true a child reader intuits their deeper personal meaning. Those fairy tale themes are at the heart of many of my own books.
And then, for me, the greatest discovery of my childhood reading life: Ray Bradbury. The one thing my father left behind when he took off was a box of books -- fantasy and science fiction. Inside was a Bradbury collection. Ray became my literary father. He was the one who taught me about the world, and he was a great teacher. I think every 12-year-old should read him (and every adult as well, but 12-year-olds are so much better readers). ''Fahrenheit 451'' is an American classic and a work of genius, and ''Something Wicked This Way Comes'' is my favorite of his books, small-town magic. I loved them all and still do. I admired Ray as a writer and a person and wish he was still here with us.
Whom do you consider your literary heroes?
Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Emily Bront, Ray Bradbury, all for different reasons, all adored. And my mentor and professor who changed my life at the Stanford writing program, the writer and critic Albert Guerard. In our workshop his first assignment shocked the class: write 50 pages a week. When the pages were handed in by the exhausted student writers, our teacher was the one to be shocked. He hadn't been serious about the assignment. Guerard was just letting us know that writers write.
Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer? Is there a particular book that made you want to write?
''The Catcher in the Rye.'' I found it on my mother's bookshelf. I knew nothing about it or its author, but my mind was blown after the very first page. I hadn't known that a book could speak so directly to a reader. After that, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
I would hate to require him to do anything more than he already has to do. I think I'd just send him a beautiful volume of Emily Dickinson's poems and hope he had a day off to read them.
You're hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?
Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Grace Paley. I had the extreme honor of reading with Grace several times. On one occasion there was the potential of some political differences with the audience. Nervous, I asked Grace what we should do if we were heckled. She said, ''Honey, we'll just sink to their level.'' Then she stood on a box because she was too tiny to reach the microphone and quickly made everyone fall in love with her. I'm sure she'd do the same at my dinner party with these two challenging, brilliant men.
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
The Russians. Even though my father wanted to name his children Nicholas and Anastasia, the rest of my Russian family was running away from the past, so I was never inclined to read the great Russian novels, now a huge regret. Now I fear I'll never have time to read ''Anna Karenina.'' My Russian stories were the ones my grandmother told me about Baba Yaga, the witch who lives in a hut built on chicken legs in the forest. Because of this I have always loved ferocious old women, and I hope to be one myself.
What book are you most eagerly anticipating this year?
A novel I know nothing about that I happen to stumble upon, as I did once upon a time searching through my mother's bookcase. That's still the best reading experience: falling in love with a book I meet by accident.
CAPTION(S):
DRAWING (DRAWING BY JILLIAN TAMAKI)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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"Alice Hoffman." The New York Times Book Review, 23 Feb. 2014, p. 7(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A359463764/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=de3d30fb. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
THE MUSEUM OF EXTRAORDINARY THINGS
By Alice Hoffman
368 pp. Scribner. $27.99.
Alice Hoffman has always celebrated the marvelousness of what's real in the world, even as she creates the distinctive atmosphere of uncanniness and magical potential that looms over her fiction. Her devoted readers expect melodramatic stories imbued with the atmosphere of folk tales. Omens and portents are her stock in trade. Feminist themes and generous amounts of Renaissance Faire-style potted history make her storytelling all the more suggestive. Eerie and powerful acts of nature signify undercurrents of mood the way irregular minor chords in the background music tell us how to feel during ominous scenes at the movies. Lost in a dark forest of one kind or another, Hoffman's characters have a heightened awareness of the hidden meanings that surround them as they struggle toward the light.
''The Museum of Extraordinary Things'' will not disappoint readers longing to be swept up by a lavish tale about strange yet sympathetic people, haunted by the past and living in bizarre circumstances. But those who have admired Hoffman's best and most gracefully literary novels (''At Risk,'' ''Seventh Heaven,'' ''Turtle Moon,'' ''Second Nature,'' ''Practical Magic,'' ''The River King'') will be less enchanted, unable to ignore the hackneyed and thinly sketched writing that diminishes many scenes in these pages.
The museum of the novel's title is a Coney Island boardwalk attraction presided over by Professor Sardie, part mad scientist and part shrewd magician. Adjacent to Luna Park, the Steeplechase and the soon-to-open Dreamland, this showcase of ''living wonders'' has at various times over the years included the Wolfman, the Butterfly Girl, the Goat Boy, the Bird Woman, the Bee Woman and the Siamese Twins, along with a menagerie of frogs, vipers, lizards, hummingbirds, a 100-year-old tortoise -- and Sardie's daughter, Coralie, who has, from the age of 10, spent hours suspended in a tank of water playing the Human Mermaid for paying customers. (As she grows older, her sinister father compels her to perform lewd after-hours displays for a select audience of patrons willing to pay a premium.)
Coralie, who narrates parts of the story in an elegiac tone, has a freakish affinity for water. Her father has trained her from girlhood to swim extraordinary distances, even in the icy November Atlantic, most often at night. Before she reaches adolescence, she can swim five miles from Coney Island, and she's at home in the tidal currents of the Hudson River. Her conditioning regimen is extreme: ''My father believed that we took on the attributes of our diet, and he made certain I ate a meal of fish every day so my constitution might echo the abilities of these creatures. We bathed in ice water. . . . My father had a breathing tube constructed so that I could remain soaking underwater in the claw-foot tub, and soon my baths lasted an hour or more. I had only to take a puff of air in order to remain beneath the surface. I felt comfortable in this element, a sort of girlfish, and soon I didn't feel the cold as others did, becoming more and more accustomed to temperatures that would chill others to the bone.''
Coralie has a secret shame. ''My father insisted I wear white cotton gloves in the summer and a creamy kid leather pair when the chill set in.'' Her bare hands are displayed only when she is the Human Mermaid, and then they're dyed blue to match her silk-covered bamboo tail. She was born with webbed fingers.
Coralie seems to accept her oddness, and she's even seen hopefully searching her own throat for signs of gills, although Hoffman tells us ''she despised herself because of this single flaw.'' Once she tried to cut through the webbing, but, as Hoffman explains, fairy-tale style, ''Beads of blood began to fall onto her lap after she nicked the first bit of skin. Each drop was so brightly crimson, she had startled and quickly dropped the knife.'' Accompanying her father on his rounds of whorehouses and morgues in his ceaseless search for living freaks, and for the human and animal body parts he can fashion into grotesque exhibits for his museum, Coralie often carries ''the same knife she had used to draw blood when she cut through the webbing on her hands'' -- only now it's to protect herself from men who might pay her unwelcome attention.
Professor Sardie's plan for his museum's renewal is set in motion at the start of 1911, when there are repeated sightings of a sea monster in the Hudson, a silvery, scaled creature, ''a being that was dark and unfathomable, almost human in its countenance, with fleet, watery movements.'' This apparition is, of course, the now-18-year-old Coralie, who swims through the night, ''keeping pace alongside the striped bass that spawned upriver, certain of herself even in uncertain tides.'' The newspapers are filled with stories about the so-called Hudson Mystery. ''All she had done was show a glimpse of what might be possible, a waterlogged and furtive river-fiend that had drifted out of nightmares and into the waterways of the city of New York.'' If the Museum of Extraordinary Things can display the captured Hudson Mystery, the crowds that have been lost to newer, gaudier entertainments will return and the professor's faltering business will survive.
As Coralie emerges from the river one evening, she catches a glimpse of a reclusive photographer named Ezekiel Cohen, who likes to take nocturnal walks with his dog in the woods of northern Manhattan. An Orthodox Jewish immigrant who has abandoned his faith and his community, he has changed his name to Eddie. He's a boy of the streets straight out of a Horatio Alger story, and he's also a witness to the horror of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire. The photographs he takes on that terrible day lead him to a mission -- solving the mystery of a young woman's disappearance.
Hoffman's depiction of the Triangle fire only vaguely conveys the pathos and urgency of that historic disaster, which took the lives of 146 garment workers in a matter of minutes. Her treatment, later in the novel, of the Dreamland conflagration, which occurred almost exactly two months later, is more authentic and vivid, perhaps because it's less familiar, allowing Hoffman to be more imaginative as she incorporates it into her plot.
Once Coralie and Eddie discover each other, their profound, mystical attraction and mutual obsession become forces of their own, driving the story forward. Despite the novel's heavy-handed passages about the rights of children, women and workers, and despite its lapses in historic tone and ambience (Eddie's habit, for example, of saying things like ''no problem''), a big, entertaining tale emerges.
''The Museum of Extraordinary Things'' is, in a way, a museum of Alice Hoffman's bag of plot tricks: girls with unusual talents, love at first sight, mysterious parents, addiction and alcoholism, orphans raised by unsuitable people. Does it rank with the best of her work? In the words of Professor Sardie: ''Our creature will be whatever people imagine it to be. For what men believe in, they will pay to see.''
CAPTION(S):
DRAWING (DRAWING BY RYAN HESHKA)
By KATHARINE WEBER
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Weber, Katharine. "Girlfish." The New York Times Book Review, 2 Mar. 2014, p. 18(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A360231017/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b60fd134. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice SURVIVAL LESSONS Algonquin (Adult Nonfiction) $15.95 10, 1 ISBN: 978-1-61620-314-6
A how-to guide to facing death and living life by the popular novelist and cancer survivor. When Hoffman (The Dovekeepers, 2011, etc.) received the diagnosis about her lump, her immediate response was denial: "I was busy after all, the mother of two young sons, caring for my ill mother, involved in my writing. My most recent novel, Here on Earth, had been chosen as an Oprah Book Club Choice; an earlier novel, Practical Magic, was being filmed in California with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. I didn't have time to be ill." Once she came to terms with the fact that disease doesn't necessarily strike at our convenience, she was able to deal directly with her situation, put her life in perspective and get her priorities in order. She was one of the lucky ones--15 years later, she remains very much alive and productive, capable of writing the book that might have helped her when the shock of cancer blindsided her. "In many ways I wrote Survival Lessons for myself to remind myself of the beauty of life, something that's all too easy to overlook during the crisis of illness or loss," she writes. Though Hoffman has earned renown as a talented writer, this isn't really a writerly book, but more like conversational advice from a close friend. Most of the advice is common sense, yet the element of choice is crucial when faced with a fate that seems beyond your control. You can choose how to respond and put your crisis in perspective: "Good fortune and bad luck are always tied together with invisible, unbreakable thread." Hoffman ends with words of wisdom from her oncologist, who advised that, "cancer didn't have to be my entire novel. It was just a chapter." In other words, this too shall pass. A lightweight but heartening book.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Hoffman, Alice: SURVIVAL LESSONS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2013. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A325986316/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3d5d9fdc. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
The Dovekeepers.
By Alice Hoffman.
Oct. 2011. 512p. Scribner, $27 (9781451617474).
Hoffman makes ancient history live and breathe in this compelling story, set in 70 CE, detailing the siege of the mountain stronghold Masada, where 900 Jews held out for months against the Romans. Hoffman's novel follows four extraordinary women. Red-haired Yael has long been shunned by her father, a renowned assassin, because of her mother's death in childbirth. Forced to flee from Jerusalem, she makes a tortuous journey across the desert, during which she becomes involved with a married man, and, after finally reaching Masada, is assigned to the dovecote, where she meets three charismatic women: Revka, a baker's wife, who witnessed her daughter's horrific death at the hands of Roman soldiers; Shirah, a tattooed wisewoman; and Shirah's daughter Aziza, a warrior of uncommon skill. Forced to deal with the outside forces intent on eradicating them and with their people's patriarchal system, which is quick to condemn unconventional behavior, the women draw great strength from their own inner resources and from each other. This is both a feminist manifesto and a deeply felt tribute to courageous men and women of faith, told with the cadence and imagery of a biblical passage.--Joanne Wilkinson
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The latest novel from the best-selling and prolific Alice Hoffman will be suppported by a national ad campaign, an author tour, and a reading-group guide. Will the biblical subject matter-quite a change of pace for Hoffman-prove as popular as her domestic dramas? Stay tuned.
Wilkinson, Joanne
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association
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Wilkinson, Joanne. "The Dovekeepers." Booklist, vol. 107, no. 18, 15 May 2011, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A257511737/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=16863027. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice THE DOVEKEEPERS Scribner (Adult Fiction) $27.00 10, 4 ISBN: 978-1-4516-1747-4
Hoffman (The Red Garden, 2011, etc.) births literature from tragedy: the destruction of Jerusalem's Temple, the siege of Masada and the loss of Zion.
This is a feminist tale, a story of strong, intelligent women wedded to destiny by love and sacrifice. Told in four parts, the first comes from Yael, daughter of Yosef bar Elhanan, a Sicarii Zealot assassin, rejected by her father because of her mother's death in childbirth. It is 70 CE, and the Temple is destroyed. Yael, her father, and another Sicarii assassin, Jachim ben Simon, and his family flee Jerusalem. Hoffman's research renders the ancient world real as the group treks into Judea's desert, where they encounter Essenes, search for sustenance and burn under the sun. There too Jachim and Yael begin a tragic love affair. At Masada, Yael is sent to work in the dovecote, gathering eggs and fertilizer. She meets Shirah, her daughters, and Revka, who narrates part two. Revka's husband was killed when Romans sacked their village. Later, her daughter was murdered. At Masada, caring for grandsons turned mute by tragedy, Revka worries over her scholarly son-in-law, Yoav, now consumed by vengeance. Aziza, daughter of Shirah, carries the story onward. Born out of wedlock, Aziza grew up in Moab, among the people of the blue tunic. Her passion and curse is that she was raised as a warrior by her foster father. In part four, Shirah tells of her Alexandrian youth, the cherished daughter of a consort of the high priests. Shirah is a keshaphim, a woman of amulets, spells and medicine, and a woman connected to Shechinah, the feminine aspect of God. The women are irretrievably bound to Eleazar ben Ya'ir, Masada's charismatic leader; Amram, Yael's brother; and Yoav, Aziza's companion and protector in battle. The plot is intriguingly complex, with only a single element unresolved.
An enthralling tale rendered with consummate literary skill.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Hoffman, Alice: THE DOVEKEEPERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2011. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A256559394/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a5c65c35. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice. Green Witch. Scholastic, 2010. 136p. $17.99. 978-0-545-14195-6.
Green Witch continues the story begun in Green Angel (Scholastic, 2003/VOYA April 2003) of remarkable Green, a teenage girl who, after losing her family in a terrible tragedy, is able to find the inner strength to carry on. Green is alone again because Diamond, the boy she loves, has gone to search for his family. Green's village is reviving--the destroyed city is slowly being rebuilt; hope is struggling to survive, even though the Horde still wants to destroy what they consider a sinful civilization. Although Green is considered a valuable member of the community due to her marvelous gardening skills, she is unhappy and longs for Diamond. Thirteen-year-old Troy wants to find his sister, so he and Green set off to find their missing people.
Green Witch is divided into five parts: "Stone Witch," "Sky Witch," "Rose Witch," "River Witch," and "Green Witch." Like Green, these women have walked through pain and anguish and emerged changed, yet strong. In each chapter, Green gains wisdom and strength from these women, enabling her to continue her quest to find her one true love.
Hoffman's magical realism shines strongly in this book, which is beautifully written with perfectly chosen words. This small yet strongly affecting volume offers profound thoughts on life, love, and loss. Like Green Angel, Green Witch can be read as a parable for our times; some scenes are evocative of the 9/11 tragedy, and the Horde members are religious zealots. This excellent novel should especially appeal to female readers.
Bilz, Rachelle
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC
http://www.voya.com
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Bilz, Rachelle. "Hoffman, Alice. Green Witch." Voice of Youth Advocates, vol. 33, no. 4, Oct. 2010, p. 366. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A249219959/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7752c339. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Green Witch , by Alice Hoffman, Scholastic Press, 2010, $17.99.
When you really love a book, a sequel can be a worrisome thing. The question isn't so much if it's as good as the first book, but rather, will it dilute all the things that made the first book so good? Because once you read the sequel, there's no going back. If it didn't work for you, it will color how you view the original, and once that damage is done, you can never regain what you lost. So the more I like a book, the more wary I am of a sequel.
Green Witch is a good example.
The previous book, Green Angel , is up there among my all-time favorite books. There are a few of Hoffman's books there, but Green Angel is simply extraordinary. It's one of those books that get everything right. I've read it several times and it invariably leaves me feeling a little speechless and out of place with the world around me. On top of that, the physical book itself is perfection. The cover, the design, the typography ... you get the idea.
Green Witch hits the mark in terms of its physical representation. In fact, the two books couldn't be better matched, visually. But I still held off reading it for quite a while after I'd picked it up because--well, see above.
I should have trusted Hoffman. The story is another jewel--the perfect companion to the earlier book.
In Green Angel , a teenage girl named Green loses everything in a huge disaster. The city where her parents and sister have gone to sell vegetables at the market is engulfed in flames, and Green is blinded while standing with the other survivors, watching the ashes fall. Her recovery is long and slow and requires her not so much to get over her grief, as to come to terms with who she is now. With the help of a ghostly dog, a kind neighbor woman, and a mute boy, Ash (as Green has renamed herself) attempts to find her place in the world.
Green Witch picks up a year or so later. If the first book was about survival, then this one is about rebirth--not simply for Green herself (she's reclaimed her original name), but also for her community which is growing increasingly fearful of what they call the Enchanted, meaning anyone who they perceive as different. Before things get out of hand, Green embarks on a journey with a typewriter strapped to her back and a sheaf of handmade paper to collect the stories of those of whom her community is the most suspicious.
The stories of the Enchanted turn out to be bittersweet, the Enchanted themselves mired in sadness and regret. Sharing the stories helps--as sharing stories always helps, in good times and bad--but a story only takes you so far. In time Green realizes that she has to step away from the stories she is being told and take action herself.
These two slim books, with their gorgeous prose and presentation, prove how important fables can still be, even in this hectic, fast-paced world in which we find ourselves. Perhaps more so, since they require us to slow down for a moment and appreciate what they have to tell us.
De Lint, Charles
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Spilogale, Inc.
http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/
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De Lint, Charles. "Green Witch." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, vol. 119, no. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2010, pp. 32+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A248907180/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3a8bed20. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
The Red Garden.
By Alice Hoffman.
Jan. 2011. 288p. Crown, $25 (9780307393876).
The lush and haunted wildlands of Massachusetts provide fertile ground for Hoffman's endlessly flowering imagination. Like The Probable Future (2003) and Blackbird House (2004), The Red Garden, a sequence of beguiling linked stories, is rooted in colonial rimes and reaches into the present. The first foolhardy white folks--the Motts, Partridges, Starrs, and Bradys--to settle in this land of blackflies, bears, eels, and harsh winters in 1750 only survive because Hallie Brady, the first of a line of determined and adept women in what becomes the small town of Blackwell in Berkshire County, goes out into the snowy wilderness to find sustenance. As spring allows the founding families to cultivate the strange red soil in the village's first garden, Johnny Apple-seed stays for a spell, and, later, Emily Dickinson happens by. Generation by generation, humans and animals form profound bonds; women's lives change, somewhat; men go to war; people are poor and in despair; illness and violence rage; strangers find refuge; and love blossoms impossibly, extravagantly, inevitably. In gloriously sensuous, suspenseful, mystical, tragic, and redemptive episodes, Hoffman subtly alters her language, from an almost biblical voice to increasingly nuanced and intricate prose reflecting the burgeoning social and psychological complexities her passionate and searching characters face in an ever-changing world.--Donna Seaman
YA/M: Hoffman is an enchanting storyteller, and her young characters and their predicaments will intrigue YAs. DS.
HIGH. DEMAND BACKSTORY:
With more than 20 books to her name, bestselling Hoffman has a loyal following, and she will be touring the country with her latest.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association
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Seaman, Donna. "The Red Garden." Booklist, vol. 107, no. 3, 1 Oct. 2010, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A239266637/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=595b2312. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice THE RED GARDEN Crown (Adult Fiction) $25.00 1, 25 ISBN: 978-0-307-39387-6
In 14 freestanding but consecutive stories, Hoffman (The Story Sisters, 2009, etc.) traces the life of the town of Blackwell, Mass., from its founding in 1750 up to the present as the founders' descendents connect to the land and each other.
Hallie Brady, who saves her fellow settlers from starvation by catching eels in the river, has a special, perhaps mystical affinity for the local bears. After her daughter's husband Harry Partridge mistakenly kills her most beloved bear in her back garden, she disappears and Harry buries the bear. In 1792, Johnny (Appleseed) Chapman, the first of many outsiders who drift through, plants a Tree of Life in the center of town. In 1816, another outsider helps find the drowned body of six-year-old Amy Starr before eloping with her older sister. Amy's "ghost" will appear to future generations. In the Civil War, an injured Partridge finds a reason to live when he falls in love with the war widow of Amy's nephew. In 1903, Isaac Partridge marries a woman who has reinvented herself, not unlike Hallie Brady. In 1935, a writer from Brooklyn comes to town as part of the WPA and falls in love with a fisherman's wife who may or may not be an enchanted eel. In 1945, the townspeople believe that the tomatoes that Hannah Partridge, Isaac's daughter, plants in her garden have the power to make wishes come true; in fact Hannah's own wish to raise a child without marriage is realized when her sister comes back from World War II with a baby girl named Kate. In 1956, Kate falls in love with a man whose loneliness has turned him into a kind of bear. Discovering bones in her garden in 1986, Kate's daughter Louise thinks they belong to a dinosaur until the man who loves her proves they came from a bear. Together the lovers re-bury the bones.
Fans of Hoffman's brand of mystical whimsy will find this paean to New England one of her most satisfying.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Hoffman, Alice: THE RED GARDEN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2010. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A256562111/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ad4bd56c. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
The Story Sisters.
By Alice Hoffman.
June 2009. 336p. Crown/Shaye Areheart, $25 (9780307393869). General Fiction.
A writer as virtuosic as Hoffman doesn't bestow the name Story on a family lightly. So, yes, this is a many-storied novel about storytellers, brimming with magic and despair, atonement and redemption. The Story sisters, Elv, Meg, and Claire, are dark-haired beauties clustered in the attic of their old Long Island house, while their lonely mother broods below. Their all-female household, a sly variation on Little Women, is under a grim fairy-tale spell, and not even sojourns with their fairy-godmother-like grandmother in Paris can protect them. As always in Hoffman's glimmering universe, nature is an awesome presence reflected in the mercurial human heart, and consequently, the Story girls are preternaturally sensitive to storms, ghosts, and plant and animal spirits. Meg is practical, while Elv and Claire share a tragic secret, and Elv channels her anguish into elaborate, demon-haunted tales of an imaginary parallel world until she discovers more effective means of self-punishment. The always dazzling Hoffman has outdone herself in this bewitching weave of psychologically astute fantasy and shattering realism, encompassing rape, drug addiction, disease, and fatal accidents. Her alluring characters are soulful, their suffering mythic, and though the sorrows are many and the body count high, this is an entrancing and romantic drama shot through with radiant beauty and belief in human resilience and transformation.--Donna Seaman
YA/M: This darkly dramatic tale, in which the painfully tea/is tempered by magic, will captivate teens. DS.
YA interest; YA/C, for hooks with particular curriculum value; YA/S, for books that will appeal most to teens with a special interesting a specific subject; YA/M, for books best suited to mature teens.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 American Library Association
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Seaman, Donna. "The Story Sisters." Booklist, vol. 105, no. 15, 1 Apr. 2009, p. 5. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A197721706/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=164cde1d. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice THE STORY SISTERS Shaye Areheart/Harmony (Adult FICTION) $$25.00 Jun. 2, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-307-39386-9
An act of child abuse has lasting consequences in Hoffman's painfully moving novel (The Third Angel, 2008, etc.).
The summer Claire Story was 8 and her sister Elv was 11, a man tried to abduct Claire in his car; Elv jumped in, told Claire to jump out, and it was hours before she returned. They never told their mother Annie or middle sister Meg--their father walked out that same summer--and neither girl was ever the same. As the main narrative opens, when Elv is 15, she's becoming an out-of-control adolescent increasingly at odds with careful, rule-following Meg. Racked with guilt over the unknown horrors her sister endured in her place, Claire tries to be loyal, but as Elv's drug use and promiscuity escalate, she backs away. The desperate Annie finally takes Elv to a rehab facility, enlisting the reluctant support of her selfish ex-husband, who insists it's all her fault. At the facility, Elv meets Lorry, a thief and addict who introduces her to heroin, but who also really loves her. The chronology speeds up after Elv comes home and a dreadful accident seals her alienation from her family. Hoffman paints wrenching scenes of tentative efforts at reconciliation that just barely fail, as Elv becomes pregnant and cleans up, but loses Lorry to his "fatal flaw." A kindly detective brings late-life happiness to Annie and metes out delayed justice to Elv's abuser, but the disasters keep coming. Two sisters grow into adulthood, dreadfully damaged by the losses they've endured and their punishing self-blame for the mistakes they made. Hoffman's habitual allusions to mysterious supernatural forces are very jarring in this context, as is the endless interpolation of memories from the terrible abduction; she could have trusted her readers to get the point with out constant prodding. A radiant denouement shows love redeeming the surviving sisters, and there are beautiful moments throughout, but they don't entirely compensate for Hoffman's excesses of plot and tone.
A near-miss from this uneven but always compelling writer.
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"Hoffman, Alice: THE STORY SISTERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2009, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A208108015/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=41b4487e. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
THE STORY SISTERS
By Alice Hoffman
325 pp. Shaye Areheart Books. $25
In Alice Hoffman's new novel, three long-haired sisters are stolen from their ''faerie'' family by mortals, stripped of their magic and given a false name. I could be wrong about that. That could be just a story the eldest sister tells her siblings.
They're imaginative, these three. They make up an enchanted world they call Arnelle and have their own language, Arnish, which looks a little like the Italian a Tolkien elf might speak after a year in Rome: Quell me mora. (''Don't ask questions.'')
The girls live with their flummoxed, suffering mother, Annie, in a big old house on Long Island with an ancient hawthorn tree in the garden, along with a birdbath and ''tremulous, prickly cucumber vines.'' Annie wants to protect her daughters from things that go bump in the night, but what she doesn't know is that ''the worst had already happened'' to the oldest girl, Elv, during the summer when she was 11.
The fantasy world of Arnelle was born of this trauma. ''It was a fairy tale in reverse,'' Elv explains. ''The good and the kind lived in the otherworld, down twisted lanes, in the woods where trout lilies grew. True evil could be found walking down Nightingale Lane.''
Of course, the girls' real life is a bit of a fairy tale too. Their grandparents live on 89th Street in Manhattan but keep an apartment in the Marais district of Paris. ''All their friends from New York and Paris'' attend their 50th-anniversary party at the Plaza. The sisters have been to the Louvre and enjoy espresso and French ice cream. They are ''diligent, beautiful girls, well-behaved, thoughtful.'' They prefer to share a room.
The true hobgoblin of youth -- hormones -- strikes, and Elv starts wearing black and slamming doors. Her family watches, unable to get through to her, as she transforms into something unfamiliar. A demon. Or a teenager. ''Some girls were in danger of vanishing just as children in fairy tales disappeared,'' Hoffman writes, ''out the door, under the hedge, never to be found again.''
Hoffman has a child's dreamy eye, in the best possible sense. To her, the stuff grown-ups don't see anymore looms huge and important -- insects banging on windowpanes, thunderstorms, a chestnut tree with a door to the ''otherworld.'' She invents a realm where that sense of the fictive doesn't go away, where imagination and reality bleed together.
But ''The Story Sisters'' itself is not a fairy tale. The characters in fairy tales are all good or all bad, and Hoffman's characters are always moving back and forth, challenging our perceptions, daring us to judge them. Her sentences tremble with allegory; nothing in this novel is ever as it appears -- or is it? As Elv becomes more troubled, she retreats farther into the world of Arnelle, and farther away from her sisters. Even the girls' last name, Story, is whimsical, lending heft to Elv's theory that they were renamed by mortal kidnappers -- we mortals being so maddeningly literal.
The last act grows a bit histrionic and narrative strands are over-tangled, then too neatly tied up, but Hoffman's writing is so lovely and her female characters so appealing that it almost doesn't matter. In the end, ''The Story Sisters,'' for all its magic realism, is about a family navigating through motherhood, sisterhood, daughterhood. It's ''Little Women'' on mushrooms. (Bookish sisters beware.) I can't wait to read it in Arnish.
CAPTION(S):
DRAWING (DRAWING BY ROMAN KLONEK)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 The New York Times Company
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Cain, Chelsea. "Fairest of Them All." The New York Times Book Review, 7 June 2009, p. 14(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A201393954/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=368761c2. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice THE THIRD ANGEL Shaye Areheart/Harmony (Adult FICTION) $25 Apr. 1, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-307-39385-2
A ghost in a down-at-the-heels London hotel ties together three tragic romances in Hoffman's latest (Skylight Confessions, 2007, etc.).
Though all three episodes are strongly conceived with complex characters, the connecting material includes carelessly repetitive plot devices (warring sisters, cancer-stricken mothers), highly improbable links among the major figures and a seriously overused blue heron. The "third angel" metaphor is also heavy-handed, but at least has a tangible connection to the plot. In addition to the Angel of Life and the Angel of Death, Dr. Lewis tells his daughter Frieda, there's a Third Angel, "who walked among us, who sometimes lay sick in bed, begging for human compassion." Frieda passes along this insight to Allie, who marries Frieda's dying son Paul during the summer of 1999 in the novel's first section. Though Allie's furiously jealous younger sister Maddy does everything she can to destroy the wedding--including sleeping with Paul, who's trying to convince his fiance that he doesn't deserve her--nothing can kill the love that blossoms in Allie as Paul's illness grows mortal. Section two moves back to 1966, when 19-year-old Frieda has fled her father's plans for her to become a doctor and gone to work as a maid at the Lion Park Hotel. Frieda falls in love with Jamie, the junkie rock star in Room 708, and writes him two songs: "The Third Angel" and "The Ghost of Michael Macklin." The latter is about the specter introduced in the book's opening pages, when Maddy hears shouting in Room 707 and learns that something terrible happened there in 1952. In fact, it was Maddy and Allie's mother, then 12 years old, who witnessed the incident that created the ghost, an outgrowth of yet another doomed wedding. The particulars are recounted in the closing section, which features another cluster of full-bodied characters. By now, however, the piling up of disasters and coincidences has become ridiculous.
Some moving material about love and loss, swamped by authorial excess.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Hoffman, Alice: THE THIRD ANGEL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2008, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A173295888/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9496a12c. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
The Third Angel. By Alice Hoffman. Apr. 2008. 288p. Crown/Shaye Areheart, $25 (9780307393852). General Fiction.
Over the course of writing more than two dozen works of fiction, Hoffman has created her very own form, the heartbreak fairy tale. Her latest and one of her best is an exceptionally well-structured, beguiling, and affecting triptych of catastrophic love stories, each laced with patterns of three and anchored to a haunted London hotel. In the first and most contemporary tale, Maddy stays at the hotel while visiting her soon-to-be-married sister and falling for her sister's fiance. Set in 1966, the middle tale features rebellious young Frieda, a college dropout working as a maid at the hotel who tries to rescue a junkie rock musician. Finally, the tragic story of the hotel's ghost revolves around precocious young Lucy, whose inadvertent role in a fatal love triangle wounds her very soul. A kind doctor repeats the novel's mantra when he says that we are accompanied by the Angel of Life, the Angel of Death, and the Third Angel, "the one who walks among us," and, like us, needs compassion. Not only is Hoffman spellbinding in this incandescent fusion of dark romance and penetrating psychic insight, she also opens diverse and compelling worlds, dramatizes the shocks and revelations that forge the self, and reveals the necessity and toll of empathy and kindness. Hoffman has transcended her own genre.--Donna Seaman
YA/M: The mesmerizing story involves resourceful teens and intense life lessons.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 American Library Association
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Seaman, Donna. "The Third Angel." Booklist, vol. 104, no. 7, 1 Dec. 2007, p. 5. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A172555157/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a24c3f0d. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Skylight Confessions
By Alice Hoffman.
262 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $24.99.
Certain words and phrases tell you a lot about a book. ''Forevermore'' is one of them -- a ''once upon a time'' for adult readers. In Alice Hoffman's latest novel, ''Skylight Confessions,'' the word appears almost exactly halfway through the story: ''Lost and then found. Discovered in some deep way. He was stuck there, he realized that now; that young girl with red hair sifted through his reality forevermore.'' This rhetorical flourish -- not just ''forever,'' but ''forevermore'' -- is a clear sign that Hoffman is aiming for the kind of lofty truths that can be reached only by going to extremes.
''Skylight Confessions'' tells the story of the Moody family, which has seen its share of extreme, even extraordinary, circumstances. Seventeen years old and newly orphaned, Arlyn Singer tells herself the first man who walks down her street ''will be my one love'' -- just before John Moody, an architecture student, turns up at her door, looking for directions. But their two nights of intense, passionate intimacy become a marriage of mutual despair and loneliness. Arlyn has two children (the second fathered by the man, she comes to think, she was truly meant to love) and then dies of cancer. Her first-born child, Sam, always slightly different, becomes a drug addict as a teenager. As he slips away, his sister, Blanca, becomes increasingly alienated, turning to fairy tales to find meaning in her broken life. The target of both children's anger, Arlyn's selfish and withdrawn widower, John, is haunted by her ghost.
It's not entirely clear what Arlyn is doing from beyond the grave. Like Blanca's fairy tales, ghost stories can provide, as Hoffman puts it, ''maps formed of blood and hair and bones.'' But here the haunting seems arbitrary. Despite his realization that Arlyn would ''sift through his reality forevermore,'' John's attachment to her is unconvincing. He's more tortured by frustrations in his architectural practice and his fractious relationship with his son. The children's nanny also sees Arlyn's ghost, but she isn't very spooked either.
Novelists need tricks, but here the trickery is unconcealed. A surfeit of sentence fragments (''Soot. One of the signs of a specter.'') gives Hoffman's prose a melodramatic quality, and much of her character development is declared instead of illustrated (''Meredith's time in Connecticut had allowed her to learn who she was and what she wanted''). These moments of clumsiness, of the magician showing her hand, draw attention to themselves rather than their occasion.
Hoffman's focus on the fantastic -- on the sky rather than the ground -- is a shame, because it clouds the novel's enduring lessons: There are many things in life that can't be explained. Some attachments can transcend death. Love isn't the opposite of hate -- and can be more powerful. These are some of the insights Hoffman seems to want to convey, but they're more often obscured than illuminated by her novel's magical effects.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 The New York Times Company
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Thomas, Louisa. "Family Failings." The New York Times Book Review, 4 Feb. 2007, p. 18(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A158790328/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b365a869. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
HOFFMAN, Alice. Incantation. Read by Jenna Lamia. 2 tapes. 3 hrs. Brilliance Audio. 2006. 1-4233-2358-0. $44.25. Vinyl; plot, reader notes.. JS *
From the KLIATT starred review of the book, September 2006: Alice Hoffman's books of magical realism and even more magical language have great appeal to teens. Here, she deliberately focuses on a YA audience to address a difficult topic: Jews living in hiding under the guise of Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition. Sixteen-year-old Estrella doesn't even know she is Jewish, although her family practices kabbalah in secret; but still she is bothered when a rabbi's books are publicly burned. The atmosphere of their beautiful little town becomes poisoned and dangerous. Anyone, it seems, can turn in a neighbor to the authorities on suspicion of being a Jew, and their house, lands, and possessions are forfeited. Adults are put to death and the children raised by Christians. Estrella's best friend Catalina, not as pretty or as charming, turns on her when she discovers her handsome betrothed is falling in love with Estrella and Estrella is falling in love with him. Estrella learns about betrayal and her secret identity at the same time.... Hoffman introduces a little-known part of history to YA readers, but those familiar with her other books may long for more detail and motivation. Award-winning reader Lamia is an excellent choice to read the first-person narrative of Estrella. She has the voice of a young teen and captures in her reading the anguish and fright of Estrella at seeing the burning of her mother and the torture of her brother. The betrayal of her longtime best friend is a bitter fact that Estrella finds hard to accept. Hoffman presents the tragedy of this period of history in a personal tale that graphically describes the horrific evil. Carol Kellerman, Lib/Media Spec. (retired), Santa Fe, NM
J--Recommended for junior high school students. The contents are of particular interest to young adolescents and their teachers.
S--Recommended for senior high school students.
*--The asterisk highlights exceptional books.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Kliatt
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Kellerman, Carol. "Hoffman, Alice. Incantation." Kliatt, vol. 41, no. 3, May 2007, p. 52. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A164594825/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9095e647. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
HOFFMAN, Alice. The ice queen. Read by Nancy Travis. 5 cds. No time listed. Hachette Audio. 2005. 1-59483-620-5. $14.98. Cardboard; plot, author, reader notes. A
When the young narrator says, in a fit of childish pique, "I wish you would disappear" to her mother leaving for a celebration of her 30th birthday, and the mother then dies in an icy crash, the narrator embeds a shard of ice in her own heart. She subsequently works as a librarian who avoids meaningful relationships, afraid of her power of wishes. After her grandmother dies, she moves to Florida, close to her brother, a meteorologist; she is struck by lightening. As part of a study of lightening survivors, she meets a man named Lazarus Jones, who exudes enough heat to melt the ice in her heart. The writing is poetic and the story is a metaphor reminiscent of Robert Frost's poem, "Fire and Ice." Which fate is worse: to be frozen by fear or burnt by fire? There are many sexual encounters in the book, which are described less passionately than other scenes, like that of her dying brother's last encounter with butterflies. Travis narrates in the voice of the strange narrator who alternates between ice and fire and does an excellent job conveying her guilt, confusion and self-doubt. Nola Theiss, Sanibel, FL
A--Recommended for advanced students and adults. This code will help librarians and teachers working in high schools where there are honors and advanced placement students. This also will help extend KLIATT's usefulness in public libraries.
Theiss, Nola
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Kliatt
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Theiss, Nola. "Hoffman, Alice. The ice queen." Kliatt, vol. 41, no. 3, May 2007, pp. 51+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A164594824/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=49a109ea. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
HOFFMAN, Alice. The foretelling. Little, Brown. 167p. c2005. 0-316-01018-9. $16.99. JS*
Amazon warriors riding horses, terrifying the men they fight: this is the world Hoffman describes with poetic force in The Foretelling. The narrator is Rain, daughter of the queen, but never spoken to by her mother because she is the product of a horrific rape. Rain is an adolescent, skilled, passionate--she wonders if she will be queen some day. Then her mother chooses to lie with a man to become impregnated with another child and awaits the birth of this daughter who would usurp Rain's inheritance. The child is a baby boy, unwanted in this all-female world, and Rain becomes a different person as she seeks to save this child's life.
Hoffman, in a brief story that holds the power of myth, examines what a society dominated by strong women would be like. The close relationships between women and the horses that take them into battle will appeal to all those horse lovers among YA readers. The larger theme is that Rain struggles to find a way to live without the constant warfare, without the hatred of men. For all those who never can get enough of Greek mythology, and for those who want to read about women who are as powerful as any man. The compelling cover will help attract readers. Claire Rosser, KLIATT
J--Recommended for junior high school students. The contents are of particular interest to young adolescents and their teachers.
S--Recommended for senior high school students.
*--The asterisk highlights exceptional books
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Kliatt
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Rosser, Claire. "Hoffman, Alice. The foretelling." Kliatt, vol. 39, no. 5, Sept. 2005, pp. 8+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A136122154/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e9c13b7b. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
The Ice Queen, by Alice Hoffman, Little, Brown, 2005, $23.95.
Regular readers of this column already know of my fondness for Hoffman's writing: Whenever I get a new book by her, everything else gets put aside and I allow myself the pleasure of being swept away for an evening, transported into the lives of her multifaceted characters through her luminous prose.
She has more than twenty books to her credit--many of them ranking among my all-time favorites--and one of the things that constantly surprises me is how she still manages to outdo herself from novel to novel. To be honest, I'm a little in awe of her talent, though happily that doesn't interfere with my enjoyment of the books.
An aspect of The Ice Queen approaches that age-old fairy tale question: what if you get what you wish for?
As a young girl, our unnamed protagonist tells her mother, in a fit of petulant anger, "I wish you were dead." The mother is on her way out to see some friends, but she never makes it, dying in a car crash en route to the diner where she was supposed to meet up with them.
Coincidence, of course, but that little eight-year-old girl grows up being very, very careful about what she wishes for in the future. She sees herself as an ice queen, who can feel nothing. Who must do nothing, form no relationships, in case she repeats her terrible misuse of power with other wishes.
Fast forward from New England--where she and her brother Ned were raised by their grandmother and she became a librarian obsessed with books about death--to Florida, where her brother is now a meteorologist and she is struck by lightning. When she recovers, she suffers neurological damage and can no longer see the color red.
Her brother gets her to take part in a study group of lightning strike victims (Orlon County, where she now lives, apparently gets two-thirds of the state's lightning strikes), and that leads her to the mysterious Lazarus Jones, who was dead for forty minutes after his own lightning strike.
There's little in the way of the supernatural in this book--or at least little for which other explanations can't be found--but its atmosphere and all its underpinnings are rife with the dark blood of fairy tales, from "The Snow Queen" to "Bluebeard," with many a way stop in between. Hoffman balances the matter-of-fact first person voice and temperament of her protagonist with events and characters that become increasingly mystical and off-kilter.
The journey takes us through the dark woods that all fairy tales do while also providing us with a bounty of lore surrounding the effects of lightning. The characters interact with a crackle of electricity, and the book's payoffs are subtle and insightful, and while unexpected, not unearned.
The Ice Queen shows us an artist at the top of her game.
Did I mention that Hoffman's pretty much my favorite author writing today? Read this book and you'll see why.
Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P.O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3V2.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Spilogale, Inc.
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De Lint, Charles. "The Ice Queen." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, vol. 109, no. 4-5, Oct.-Nov. 2005, pp. 52+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A136260963/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1c5f50cc. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice & Wolfe Martin MOONDOG Illus. by Yumi Heo Scholastic (32 pp.) $16.95 Aug. 2004 ISBN: 0-439-09861-0
Two children discover hidden sides to their dog and to a lonely neighbor in this atmospheric tale from an author more known for psychologically charged novels. The morning after an early September full moon, Michael and Hazel find a puppy on their porch and a ravaged front yard. Usually so sweet that they dub him "Angel," the pup proceeds to demolish the kitchen come the next full moon, and then to run away. The children follow Angel's trail to the spooky house of old Miss Mingle, who turns out to be not the termagant she's reputed to be, but a friendly lady who offers delicious cookies, plus the news that Angel is her own dog's offspring, and a "moondog" given to serious behavioral changes every month unless given a certain potion. A friendship develops, and come Halloween (full moon again), the evidently dosed dogs, dressed in capes and fangs, placidly flank Miss Mingle's door while she dispenses cookies to suddenly eager trick-or-treaters. No, it doesn't exactly hang together, but Heo's art--bright colors and broad patterns--reflects the tale's mysterious tone and interspecies closeness--and many young dog owners will recognize a touch of moondog in their own pets. (Picture book. 7-9)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Hoffman, Alice & Wolfe Martin: Moondog." Kirkus Reviews, vol. 72, no. 13, 1 July 2004, p. 631. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A119369865/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3bbf84cb. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
HOFFMAN, Alice. Green angel. Scholastic. 116p. c2003, 0-439-44385-7 $5.99. JS*
To quote from the review of the hardcover in KLIATT, January 2003: Hoffman follows up her other colorfully titled novels for YAs (Aquamarine, Indigo) with this poetic fairytale about a 15-year-old girl nicknamed Green, because she has a talent for gardening. One day her parents and younger sister head out to the nearby city to sell the vegetables they grow, but Green stays home to tend the garden. A terrible catastrophe strikes the city that day, a fire so devastating that the embers fly all the way to Green's home and get in her eyes, nearly blinding her.
Grief-stricken by the loss of her family, Green puts thorns on her clothes and nails on her boots, and covers her skin with tattoos of black vines and black roses, renaming herself "Ash." She scrounges desolately in the woods for any food she can find, and it isn't until she takes in a ghostly white greyhound that her heart starts to open up again to others. She helps out a neighbor and a former classmate, adopts some sparrows and a hawk, and welcomes a mute, fire-damaged boy to come stay in her house. She finally accepts help from others--the sparrows weave her a fishing net from strands of her hair, for example--and gradually her heart starts to heal and her black tattoos begin to turn green. She is Green once again, with a new understanding of loving and letting go, realizing that "There was the world waiting outside, aching and ruined, but beautiful all the same."
This parable has the pull and charm of myth, and the clear reference to the events of 9/11 give it an extra poignancy. Fairytale and fantasy fans will love this.
J--Recommended for junior high school students. The contents are of particular interest to young adolescents and their teachers.
S--Recommended for senior high school students.
*--The asterisk highlights exceptional books.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Kliatt
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Rohrlick, Paula. "Hoffman, Alice. Green angel." Kliatt, vol. 38, no. 5, Sept. 2004, pp. 30+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A122460915/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=16e43ed3. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice BLACKBIRD HOUSE Doubleday (240 pp.) $19.95 Aug. 1, 2004 ISBN: 0-385-50761-5
With a dozen stories, some more clearly connected than others but all set in the same farmhouse on Cape Cod from the time of the British blockade to the present, Hoffman (Blue Diary, 2002, etc.) creates a continuous narrative built up through a sense of place.
Blackbird House was built "On the Edge of the World" by a fisherman lost, along with his younger son, during what he'd hoped was to be his last sea voyage before settling down to farm. "The Witch of Truro" is actually Ruth, a desperate orphan who finds love and security with a kindly one-legged blacksmith on the farm. When Ruth's husband dies years later, her daughter buries "The Token" to help her recover. These stories lean heavily on symbolism--fire, water, the color red, a white blackbird--but Hoffman has grown in subtlety, so that the recurring motifs and occasionally heightened realism work nicely within the book's structure. At the center, three interlocking stories follow Violet, a bookish farm girl. She falls in love with a visiting Harvard professor who ends up marrying her prettier sister--but not before impregnating Violet. Violet marries a good man and happily raises three children on the farm. The oldest, unaware of his paternity, wins a scholarship to Harvard and leaves Cape Cod. When he dies in Europe years later, Violet brings home his son to raise. That grandson returns from WWII with a Jewish wife, a Holocaust survivor ready to meet the challenge of Violet's fierce love. In the '50s and '60s, unhappiness hovers over the farm: murder, resentments, suicide. But in the concluding pieces, about a family that must rebuild itself after confronting a child's bout with leukemia, the farm becomes a source of love and renewal. While family names come and go (and sometimes reappear), the farm undergoes its own evolution.
A quiet but deeply moving achievement of lyric power. (Agent: Elaine Markson/Elaine Markson Literary Agency)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Hoffman, Alice: Blackbird House." Kirkus Reviews, vol. 72, no. 10, 15 May 2004, p. 461. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A117259101/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=38638b8d. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
BLACKBIRD HOUSE ALICE HOFFMAN. Doubleday, $19.95 (240p) ISBN 0-385-50761-5
* Prolific novelist Hoffman (The Probable Future; Blue Diary; etc.) offers 12 lush and lilting interconnected stories, all taking place in the same Cape Cod farmhouse over the course of generations. Built during British colonial days by a man who dies tragically on a final fishing trip, Blackbird House is home, in the following generation, to a man who lest his leg to a giant halibut. In the late 19th century, Blackbird inhabitant Violet Cross has a brief affair with a Harvard scholar who inevitably betrays her; in the story that follows, she pushes her son, Lion West, to Harvard in 1908, which in turn launches him to life--and early death--in England. Lion's orphaned son, Lion West Jr., serves in World War II and meets a German-Jewish woman spirited enough to stand up to his possessive grandmother Violet. Hoffman's symbols are lovingly presented and polished: the 10-year-old boy who drowned with his father in the first story sets free a pet blackbird, who returns, now all white, to live with the boy's mother; in the last two stories, a 10-year-old boy blames a white crow for his mischief, and, a generation later, that boy's grown-up sister meets a 10-year-old boy who makes her reconsider selling Blackbird House. Fire, water, milk, pears, halibut--these, too, play important symbolic and sometimes almost magical roles. This may net be the subtlest of literary devices, but Hoffman's lyrical prose weaves an undeniable spell. Agent, Elaine Markson. (Aug. 1)
A starred review indicates a book of oustanding quality.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 PWxyz, LLC
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"Blackbird House." Publishers Weekly, vol. 251, no. 25, 21 June 2004, p. 42. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A118672005/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f5e3a323. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
PW: In The Probable Future, your 16th adult novel, each descendant of Rebecca Sparrow, a young woman drowned for witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts, has a supernatural gift that changes her life. What do you want to convey about the nature of gifts?
Alice Hoffman: In all of these gifts, there's a glitch. You realize that it's not exactly what you think it is. Jenny can dream other people's dreams, but she makes a mistake and doesn't know whose dream is whose. Stella can see the way people will die, but there's the possibility of intervention. So it's like a process of a discovery, that yes, you have a gift, but things change, and you have to learn how to go with it.
PW: And if you accept the gift, what else do you have to accept?
AH: I really feel like the gift is also the curse. It's always half-and-half. Whatever brings you the most joy will also probably bring you the most pain. Always a price to pay.
PW: Why did you return to the theme of witchcraft and magic, which you last addressed in Practical Magic?
AH: I was in the middle of writing Here on Earth, and it was so dark and difficult for me to write that I stopped halfway through and wrote Practical Magic. I'm interested in witchcraft's symbolic essence and history more than in the "craft" itself--what it means to be a woman in this society and an outcast. It's also about mothers and daughters, not about contemporary witchcraft. I really felt that in writing this book I completed some circle. I wrote it after my mother had died.
PW: Love, fulfilled or unfulfilled, is also a common thread. Do you believe, as you wrote in your novel, that love is "catching, like a common cold"?
AH: (Laughs) I think it's so mysterious, so impossible to explain and so defies all logic. It's so completely interesting, no matter how many times you examine it. I don't have a clue!
PW: The rose motif of The River King returns, this time when the matriarch Elinor strives to breed a blue rose. Was this a deliberate metaphor?
AH: I think that this is a universal search, for the blue rose and everything it means, to try to create something that doesn't exist without your intervention, something that's a miracle and impossible, but you keep trying again and again. In some ways it's a metaphor for creating, or writing a novel. It's the process that's the important thing, the search, the quest. In a period of about five years I lost so many people that. I'd loved. This bock was a way of figuring out how you go on in this world of sorrow.
PW: What's next?
AH: I'm working on another short story collection. Also, The River King might be made into a film by Nick Willing, a British director. The Blue Diary was bought by CBS; the director is Nancy Savoca. I'm also doing a children's picture book, Moon Dog, with my son, Wolfe Martin, about a puppy who turns into a Werewolf, for Halloween 2004.
PW: You once said, "Our fate is tied to the world around us." How can we remain hopeful in the face of troubling global events?
AH: You can try to take sorrow and make it into something enduring, meaningful arid beautiful. I always feel guilty that this is my job, that I get to do this. Even in times when it's difficult to figure out, how do you go forward, art--and books--always help.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 PWxyz, LLC
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Hall, Melissa Mia. "The quest for a blue rose and other unexpected gifts: talks with Alice Hoffman." Publishers Weekly, vol. 250, no. 18, 5 May 2003, p. 196. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A101860117/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=72b3c98f. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
ALICE HOFFMAN. Doubleday, $24.95 (320p) ISBN 0-385-50760-7
* Magic is once again knitted into the fabric of a Hoffman novel, this one revolving around a New England family living with the legacy of witchcraft. In colonial Unity, Mass., Rebecca Sparrow was tried as a witch and drowned because of her physical inability to feel pain. Her present-day descendants possess extraordinary gifts. Elinor, the dying matriarch of the Sparrow family, has the ability to discern liars. Her estranged daughter, Jenny Avery, can divine other people's dreams. And Jenny's 13-year-old daughter, Stella, knows how and when people will die. Jenny is recently divorced from Will Avery, a charming but erratic and hard-drinking music teacher; she and Stella live in Boston, where Stella is a charity case at the exclusive Rabbit School for girls. Brainy and unpopular, Stella chafes at her mother's invasive omniscience while trying to make sense of her own powers. When Stella asks her father, Will, to try to prevent a death, he ends up becoming a murder suspect, and her mother sends her to live wit h Elinor at Cake House, her home in Unity, until the scandal dies down. Jenny and Will soon join her, as does Will's brother, Matt, a reclusive scholar, and Stella's best friend, the audacious, jaded Juliet Aronson. Matt is studying the life of Rebecca Sparrow, and his research reveals strange echoes of Rebecca's story in the lives of her descendants. Subplots are numerous: Brock Stewart, Elinor's doctor, has been secretly in love with Elinor for years; his teenage grandson, Hap, meets the Sparrows and develops a crush on Juliet; and Will becomes close with Liza, an old high school classmate of Jenny's. The plot is crowded, and readers will wish for more time with each of the full-bodied, wholly absorbing characters, but few will complain: Hoffman's storytelling is as spellbinding as ever. Author tour. (June 24)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Probable Future. (Fiction)." Publishers Weekly, vol. 250, no. 18, 5 May 2003, p. 196. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A101860095/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3ff2b6eb. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
THE PROBABLE FUTURE
By Alice Hoffman.
322 pp. New York:
Doubleday. $24.95.
THERE'S something almost sinfully satisfying about Alice Hoffman's fiction. In this archly ironic age, it's deeply unhip to confess a taste for magic and happy endings, but most people can't survive on a strict diet of postmodern posturing. Like a piece of old-fashioned chocolate cake, Hoffman's 16th novel feeds a craving. It may not be especially memorable or surprising, but it's delicious while it lasts.
''The Probable Future'' covers familiar Hoffman territory: a Massachusetts village resonating with three centuries of history and tragedy; a tribe of self-reliant and oddly gifted women; children on the brink of adulthood and love-struck adults gone as silly as teenagers; and a wet, green natural landscape described with more sensual detail than any of the characters.
For 13 generations, the town of Unity has been home to the female descendants of Rebecca Sparrow, a strange child who walked out of the woods one spring day in 1682 carrying a silver compass and a golden bell and wearing a silver star on a chain around her neck. On her 13th birthday, she found that she was no longer able to feel pain; before she turned 18, she had been tried as a witch and drowned. Ever since, Sparrow women have been born in March and have awakened on their 13th birthdays with their own special (and unusual) abilities: weather prediction, fleetness of foot, immunity to fire. They keep to themselves at Cake House, the oldest edifice in Unity, and in a glass case in the parlor they have preserved a ''private and personal museum of pain'': the bell and compass, a braid of Rebecca's hair and 10 bloodstained arrowheads the local boys once shot at her for sport.
Jenny, the last Sparrow but one, is able to see other people's dreams, but that hasn't helped anyone much, least of all herself. At 17, oppressed by her family history in general and her emotionally distant mother, Elinor, in particular, she eloped to Boston and never came back. Elinor's gift is the ability to discern falsehood, and Jenny's now-estranged husband, Will Avery, is a born liar; mother and daughter haven't spoken in 25 years. Jenny's daughter, Stella, the 13th Sparrow girl, was born ''feet first, the mark of a healer,'' and as the novel opens she turns 13.
A Hoffman plot leaves no thread untied. Everyone, however hapless or hopeless, finds true love; every villain is foiled or reformed; and the characters take their bows in happy pairs, as in a Shakespeare comedy. Stella's burdensome gift -- the ability to see the moment of a person's death -- snares her father in a murder investigation and forces her to take refuge at Cake House. But the murder subplot is cursory, and even the magical-ability aspect of the story is secondary to Hoffman's larger preoccupation: the power of love, both to mislead and to redeem. She is less magic realist than shameless romantic.
Love, it turns out, is stronger than magic. Clairvoyant or not, when it comes to true love the three living Sparrows are powerless. The bitter grief that has calcified around Elinor flowed not just from her husband's death but from the posthumous discovery of his secret life: ''She'd been distracted by love, which seemed, at least at the time, to be the truest thing in the world.'' Jenny threw away her future for charming, selfish Will, but instead of his dreams she can see ''only emptiness, the blank space of an individual who could fall into slumber without a single thought, without a care in the world.'' And though Stella's visions can be terrifying, they can't always be interpreted literally, especially when it comes to those she holds dearest. Love is blind, even for those with second sight.
Hoffman methodically dunks her characters in pools of despair and then lets love pull them out. Elinor, Jenny and Will are partnered respectively by Brock Stewart, the sympathetic town doctor; Matt Avery, as steadfast as his brother Will is fickle; and Liza Hull, the jolly proprietor of Hull's Tea House. And with predictable regularity, each is gripped by the fear that everything is lost. ''I have nothing,'' Jenny declares upon her return to Unity, divorced, jobless and barely able to sustain a civil conversation with her mother or her daughter. ''I've lost everything,'' Elinor realizes, as the cancer eating at her bones begins to undermine her stubborn isolation. But in Hoffmanland it's always darkest before the dawn -- the sun rises in a glow of mawkish sentiment, and pain evaporates like dew. ''Love ambushed you, it lay in wait, dormant for days or years. It was the red thread, the peachstone, the kiss, the forgiveness. It came after you, it escaped you, it was invisible, it was everything.'' There is such a thing as too much chocolate cake.
''The Probable Future'' features fewer overtly magical moments than ''Practical Magic,'' its closest relative in the Hoffman oeuvre. Hoffman's greatest strength here is her ability to keep the boundaries of magic indistinct -- in her hands, superstition takes on the force of prophecy, and it's not always easy to tell witchery from folk wisdom. ''Stick a pin in a candle and light it,'' Stella's best friend advises. ''When the flame burns down to the pin, your true love will walk through the door.'' Magic or not? ''Some people vow that when someone feeds you well, you have to be honest with them,'' Hoffman writes. It's not a hex, it's human nature -- a far more potent form of magic.
Hoffman reinforces this beguiling ambiguity with her setting. It's March, ''season of snow and of spring, of lions and lambs, of endings and beginnings, green month, white month, month of heartache, month of extreme good luck.'' Snapping turtles lurk in the ruts of the road that leads to Cake House, bees drowse in the laurel hedges, sparrows line the branches of the trees overhead. Are they local fauna or familiars? Elinor names the rains of spring -- fish rain, rose rain, daffodil rain, glorious rain, red clover rain, boot polish rain, swamp rain, the fearsome stone rain'' -- and the weather becomes an incantation. When Hoffman throws in something silly, like lovers ''kissing until the stone beneath them grew so hot mosquitoes lighting on the granite burst into flame,'' the effect is cheapened.
Cynics will gag on homilies like ''Everything that mattered was within,'' but Hoffman is an unapologetic optimist, and optimism is in short supply these days. It feels like a vacation to curl up with this fairy tale suffused with the ''filmy green light'' of spring, smelling of ''wild ginger and lake water,'' its sweetness balanced by deft touches of the Gothic. Hoffman's fans will not be disappointed.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Nimura, Janice P. "Bewitched." The New York Times Book Review, vol. 108, 6 July 2003, p. 26. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A104717695/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b9306146. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
by Alice Hoffman, Scholastic Press, 2003, $16.95.
WE ALL know better than to judge a hook by its cover, but most of us do it anyway, especially when we're browsing the bookstore and not really sure what we're looking for. That's when the attractive book cover has the advantage over its less-lucky cousins.
Green Angel is one of those lucky books, though to be honest, it being a Hoffman title, I would have picked it up anyway. Nevertheless, as a package, this small book aimed for the YA market is one of the loveliest presentations I've come across in years. The front sports a young woman in a red, sleeveless top and green skirt who appears to be growing out of the ground. She's reading a book from which crows are flying. The back has another young woman, this one wearing boots with nails protruding from them, stockings over tattooed legs, a plaid miniskirt, a black leather jacket, a tattoo of bat's wings at the nape of her neck, short cropped hair.
The front is ethereal, but still earthy. The woman is facing us, though her attention is on the book. On the back, her punky counterpart has her back to us. The one welcomes, the second creates distance.
The art is by Matt Murhain and continues inside with a handful of very simple chapter headings. The design of the interior--simple, graceful, welcoming, with a wonderful quirky copyright page--is by Elizabeth B. Parisi.
I've gone on at length about the looks of Green Angel simply because I find it rare these days for a book to look so good, with obvious loving attention paid to every aspect, right down to the typeface. And happily, the story itself lives up to every pledge the look of the book promises.
It's the story of fifteen-year-old Green, who lives in a rural area with her family outside of a large city. Life is wonderful until her parents and sister go into the city on the same day that a disaster strikes, killing everyone in the city at the time and filling the sky with ashes. The ashy skies last for months and looters soon appear on the scene. Green falls into despair and changes from the young woman on the front cover of the book to the one on the back, both in looks and temperament.
This is a book about grief and dealing with loss, but it's also a book about hope and growth and change. The setting and story are both utterly modern and anywhere timeless. The language is poetic, but still down-to-earth--gorgeous, really. Green Angel is one of those rare cases in which there is not one word too many or too few. I was so enamored with the book that when I got to the end, I immediately turned back to the first page and began to read it again.
Am I offering too many superlatives? Perhaps. Art and story, and how they're delivered, are completely subjective, so it's difficult to say. I just know that if I didn't already love Hoffman's work, this book would do the trick. As it was, I fell in love with her storytelling gifts all over again.
And if I haven't already convinced you to give the book a try, perhaps I can appeal to those of you with a charitable soul. Hoffman donated her advance for the book, and will be donating a portion of the royalties, to The Green Angel Grant at The New York Women's Foundation, which is dedicated to bringing economic security to the low-income women and girls of New York City after 9/11. For more information, go to: http:// www.nywf.org/green=angel.html.
So if you do pick up a copy, not only do you get a beautiful book, but you'll also be contributing to a worthy cause.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Spilogale, Inc.
http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/
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De Lint, Charles. "Green Angel." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, vol. 105, no. 6, Dec. 2003, pp. 24+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A110575239/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1619b81f. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Scholastic. 84p. illus. c2002. 0-439-25635-6. $16.95. J
Hoffman follows up her first novella for YAs, Aquamarine, with another short and water-related fantasy tale. Martha, age 13, lives in Oak Grove, where the memory of a terrible flood makes everyone fear anything watery--everyone but Martha's best friends, brothers Trevor and Eli, who are nicknamed Trout and Eel for the webbing between their fingers and toes. They dream of the sea, but their adoptive parents fear they will lose them if they ever return to Ocean City, where they rescued the boys. Meanwhile, Martha's father is still grieving his wife's death, and a neighbor named Hildy Swoon, whom Martha detests, is trying to move into her father's life. The three children plan to run away to Ocean City, but just as they are leaving town a storm comes up, with drenching rain that creates another fearful flood. Trout and Eel, in their element at last, dive into the flood waters and save people in danger, clearing a wall so that the water can flow out of town. The boys retrieve longlost memories of their mermaid mother, and their adoptive parents move with them to Ocean City. Hildy Swoon is scared out of town by the flood, and Martha's father comes back to his old self. Martha still dreams of going off to become a dancer someday, but she no longer feels the need to run away from Oak Grove.
Illustrated with what looks likes indigotinted photos, this fairy tale is a dreamy, poignant story of friendship, love, loss, and recovery that will appeal to fantasy lovers.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 Kliatt
http://hometown.aol.com/kliatt/
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Rohrlick, Paula. "Hoffman, Alice, Indigo." Kliatt, vol. 36, no. 3, May 2002, pp. 10+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A107124359/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=23c0eadb. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
By Alice Hoffman. Scholastic, $16.95. (Ages 10 and up)
Believers in magic know that it rarely arrives in the form you might expect. They also know, as Alice Hoffman does, that if magic is the only hope in a desperate situation, it will arrive; you just have to be on the lookout. Claire and Hailey, 12-year-old next-door neighbors and best friends, are already well acquainted with loss. Claire's parents died in a car crash; Hailey's family has been sundered. by divorce. At the end of a white-hot summer, Claire and the grandparents she lives with will move to Florida, away from the house so close to Hailey's that the two friends can wave to each other through their open kitchen windows. They are spending a nearly wordless August at the deserted, run-down Capri Beach Club, itself scheduled to be razed at summer's end, wishing with all their might that the calendar will somehow get stuck and September will never come. Enter Aquamarine, a spoiled, disagreeable mermaid who is swept into the Capri's pool in a howling storm. A mermaid? Why not? Is that any more magical th an a purple snail or a moon jellyfish or a best friend? Aquamarine, as it turns out, is lovesick for Raymond, the handsome, bookish lifeguard who is the only other inhabitant of the Capri in its final days. She refuses to go back to the ocean, even though she will perish if she doesn't. The mermaid's predicament offers the girls one last illuminating adventure and helps them find the courage to step forward into their separate futures. This spare, haunting novella with dreamy blue illustrations is Hoffman's 14th book, her second for young readers. For them, it is a lovely introduction to the author's storytelling genius and matter-of-fact, lyrical style.
The plot is familiar; Steven Spielberg's "E.T." (and its many literary precursors) comes to mind, but Hoffman makes the tale her own. Adult readers who have fallen under her spell won't want to miss "Aquamarine" either.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Benzel, Jan. "Aquamarine. (Children's Books in Brief)." The New York Times Book Review, vol. 106, no. 22, 3 June 2001, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A80498644/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e474a02e. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
The River King, by Alice Hoffman, Putnam, 2000, $23.95.
I CONSIDER Alice Hoffman to be one of the best fantasists writing today; though perhaps I should say one of the best practitioners of mythic fiction, a term coined by Terri Windling to describe stories that deal with the relationships characters have with each other, with themselves, and with the world in which they live that use mythological and folkloric material either as a resonating mirror, or to illuminate those same concerns by allowing interior landscapes and emotional states to appear physically "on stage" with what most would consider more realistically portrayed elements. (For a longer discussion on this subject, you should visit Terri's website at www.endicott-studio.com.)
Hoffman, undoubtedly, simply considers herself a writer, though she has been quoted as saying, "I'm telling fairy tales for grown-ups."
But by any description, with book after book, she remains at the top of her field and she's one of those few writers who, when I get a new novel by her, whatever else I'm reading gets put aside until her book is done. (The list of such authors is short and also includes a few other names that usually aren't appropriate to discuss in this column, such as Andrew Vachss and Barbara Kingsolver ... but I digress.)
As is usual with a new Hoffman book, The River King jumped the queue and was started immediately. And also, as usual, I wasn't disappointed for a moment.
This time out she takes us to the fictional small town of Haddan, Massachusetts, an environment divided in two between those native to the town, and those attending the Haddan School, a prestigious boarding school. The focus starts out on a couple of misfits attending the school, but when one of them dies -- apparently a suicide -- and the local police become involved, old secrets and new take center stage, and the already-divided town becomes a hotbed of tension.
What I like about Hoffman's writing is that everything is of equal importance. The backdrop of Haddan and the natural flora and fauna of New England are as much characters as the humans. And whether she takes us into the heads of one of the misfit students, various members of the faculty, or even the investigating police officer, the characters all ring individual and true. Unlike many literary writers, she's not afraid of Story, but her prose is gorgeous as well as functional. In other words, there's balance to her work, but also variety and beauty.
When she steps away from the known world into the magical, there's no sense of a dividing line. Ghosts appear in photographs, only seen by the camera, and they leave cryptic messages like pockets full of fish and river water, or the scent of roses, but these paranormal elements grow naturally out of the story and it's often the more mundane aspects that seem the most magical. Perhaps this is because, as Hoffman has said in a recent interview, "If you look at anything long enough or closely enough, it feels like magic."
Whatever the reason, I come away from her work with more of a sense of wonder than I do the greater portion of what's marketed as fantasy, which makes The River King, the latest in a string of jewels from Hoffman's keyboard, a deeply satisfying book.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Spilogale, Inc.
http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/
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DE LINT, CHARLES. "The River King." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, vol. 100, no. 2, Feb. 2001, p. 31. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A69290837/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=548b699a. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Hoffman, Alice. Blue Diary. July 2001. 324p. Putnam, $24.95 (0-399-14802-7).
Hoffman writes from on high, a storytelling goddess who drenches the earth with flower-opening sunshine one day, only to bring on the most abysmal gloom the next. She enchants and she riles, and her powers are extraordinary, although the overture to her fourteenth novel is awfully sweet. Ethan and Jorie, gorgeous and madly in love after 13 years of marriage, are just too horribly perfect. Ethan is a carpenter, baseball coach, and volunteer fireman. Jorie is a homemaker and a gifted gardener, and their 12-year-old son, Collie, is handsome and good. It's enough to make you puke, and that's exactly Hoffman's intention because this is a make-believe life that has run its course. The girl-next-door, the younger, funny-looking one named Kat, not her exquisite and coldhearted sister Rosarie, misses her father, who committed suicide, and has never trusted Collie's, so when she recognizes au old photograph of Ethan shown on a most-wanted TV show, she makes the fateful call and then watches in shock while her neighbors' lives collapse like a house that looks fine from the outside but has been consumed by termites until it's no more than a shell. Nothing will ever be the same for the denizens of Monroe, Massachusetts, after Ethan is arrested for the long-unsolved murder of a 15-year-old Maryland girl. Many rally to his cause; Kat and Collie grow up too fast; Jorie's best friend copes with breast cancer; and Jorie, devastated but lucid, realizes that she must learn the truth whatever the cost. This canny tale of abrupt reversals and courageous, unpopular choices is as suspenseful as it is lyrical and provocative.
YA/M: The crucial role of young people in the story will hook teens. HR.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Seaman, Donna. "Blue Diary." Booklist, vol. 97, no. 18, 15 May 2001, p. 1707. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A75563341/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=280234a5. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
ALICE HOFFMAN. Putnam, $23.95 (336p) ISBN 0-399-14599-0
* Set in and around an exclusive private school in fictional Haddan, Mass., bestselling author Hoffman's (Practical Magic; Here on Earth) latest novel flows as swiftly and limpidly as the Haddan River, the town's mystical waterway. As one expects in a Hoffman novel, strange things have always happened in Haddan--a combination of Mother Nature gone awry and human nature following suit. In 1858, the year the school was completed, a devastating flood almost destroyed it and the town. The esteemed headmaster, Dr. Howe, married a pretty local girl who hung herself from the rafters "one mild evening in March." Local superstitions prove true more often than not, and twice in recent history a black, algaeladen rain has covered people and buildings with a dark sludge. An uneasy peace has always existed between the locals and the Haddan School, based on the latter's financial benefit to the community and the local authorities' willingness to look the other way when necessary to maintain the school's reputation. But when student August Pierce is found drowned in the Haddan River, detective Abel Grey is flooded with memories of his own teenage brother's suicide, and refuses to look away. Supporting characters are richly textured: new photography instructor Betsy Chase feels unsafe in Haddan, yet somehow finds herself engaged to a mysterious young history professor Eric Herman; Carlin Leander, a poor, strikingly beautiful young girl, comes to Haddan to recreate herself and escape her neglectful mother, and becomes misfit August's only friend while dating the most popular boy on campus; Helen Davis, chair of the history department, is haunted by a long-ago affair she had with Dr. Howe, which she believes had something to do with his young wife's suicide. As ever, Hoffman mixes myth, magic and reality, addressing issues of town and gown, enchanting her readers with a many-layered morality tale and proving herself once again an inventive author with a distinctive touch. Literary Guild main selection, Doubleday Book Club featured alternate; foreign rights sold in the U.K., Germany, Norway, Denmark; major ad/promo; 14-city author tour. (July)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 PWxyz, LLC
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"THE RIVER KING." Publishers Weekly, vol. 247, no. 23, 5 June 2000, p. 71. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A62737057/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3db0fbbf. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
ALICE HOFFMAN, ILLUS. BY STEVE JOHNSON AND LOU FANCHER. Hyperion, $15.99 (48p) ISBN 0-7868-0367-3
Hoffman's (Fireflies) fantasy about a girl who overcomes her fears contains a wise grandfather, a wicked circus owner, a herd of horses white as clouds and another horse the size of a Saint Bernard. Unfortunately, the abrupt transition from the realistic, leisurely opening of the story to its fantasy conclusion seems to crack the story in half like an egg. Jewel swears that "the one thing...she would never do, no matter what, was ride a horse." But the girl feels protective of Bug, a newborn runtlike foal, and Hoffman convincingly conveys the blossoming relationship between girl and horse. At a climactic moment, Jewel mounts Bug in response to a cruel classmate's challenge to a horse race; she can't stop Bug from running over a cliff and jumps off him. Here the tale takes a preposterous turn. In an unlikely scenario, while Jewel walks to the cliff's edge to check on the horse, "everyone else headed back to the school." Thus, only Jewel witnesses Bug unfurling previously undetectable wings. Later, during one of Bug's flights, a circus owner sees his gifts and abducts him. Timid Jewel single-handedly saves not only Bug, but also a herd of ponies trained by a woman who beats them. Hoffman unfolds her story with graceful language and a compelling voice, but the tale's swoop into fantasy may leave readers befuddled. Johnson and Fancher's dark and hazy paintings are appropriately mysterious, but do little to help make the fantasy elements of the story believable. Ages 5-9. (Aug.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 PWxyz, LLC
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"HORSEFLY." Publishers Weekly, vol. 247, no. 33, 14 Aug. 2000, p. 355. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A64425870/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8747dee1. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Alice Hoffman. Putnam, $23.95 (304p) ISBN 0-399-14313-0
Often, in her soulful novels, Hoffman (Practical Magic, etc.) lets mystical atmospherics-animals that take on superhuman qualities, intense colors and temperatures, minute vibrations in the air that signal ghosts or spirits--do all the work while her characters behave in strange and incredible ways under the influence of forces outside themselves. In this novel, the characters' behavior, while highly emotional, is initially at least traceable to psychological motivation. Unfortunately, Hoffman abandons psychological credibility halfway through, after which her protagonist, March Murray, behaves like an automaton. When March comes back to her childhood home in a small Massachusetts town after 19 years in California, she is swept with longing for Hollis, her former soul mate and lover who ran away in a fit of pique. March waited for him for three years, then married her nextdoor neighbor, Richard Cooper. When Hollis finally did return, he wed Richard's sister, who has since died. Hollis now determines to win March back, and she can't resist his single-minded pursuit. Hoffman conveys the mesmerizing lure of a lost love with haunting sensuality; but March's excuses for Hollis's violent personality and for his physical abuse of her and her teenaged daughter, Gwen, are well beyond the willed myopia of even obsessive love. Other love affairs--between the housekeeper who raised March and the man who was her father's law partner; and between rebellious teenager Gwen (the best character by far, drawn with delightful realism) and March's reclusive brother's son--are described with much more insight and plausibility. The high drama of this novel, and Hoffman's assured and lyrical prose, may carry the day for readers who can accept the premise that a passionate obsession can make sweet reason, maternal protectiveness and the instinct for self-preservation fly out the window. 100,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild featured alternate; film rights to Douglas Reuther. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1997 PWxyz, LLC
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"Here on Earth." Publishers Weekly, vol. 244, no. 24, 16 June 1997, p. 44. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A19506240/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=64e8a4e6. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
I love wuthering heights. I love Alice Hoffman. What could be more promising than a new Alice Hoffman novel that rewrites Wuthering Heights?
Emily Bronte's great Victorian novel of passion tells of the havoc wreaked upon the Earnshaw and Linton families by the foundling Heathcliff. Brought home from Liverpool by Mr. Earnshaw, Heathcliff forms an incendiary attachment to Catherine Earnshaw and usurps the place of Catherine's brother Hindley, only to be tyrannized in turn by Hindley after his father's death. When Catherine, entranced by the wealthy Lintons who live nearby, decides to marry gentle Edgar Linton, thinking she can have his riches and Heathcliff's passion too, Heathcliff disappears.
He returns three years later, a handsome, wealthy man bent on revenge. He marries Edgar's sister Isabella, wins Hindley's property away at cards and shares a climactic embrace with Catherine, before she dies in childbirth. Heathcliff brutalizes Hindley, Isabella, Hindley's son, his own son and Edgar and Catherine's daughter. Though he triumphs in his desire for control of people and property, gaining ownership of the Earnshaw and Linton estates as most of the other characters die off, his triumph is unsatisfactory, and he too dies, yearning only to be reunited with Catherine. The novel ends with the imminent marriage of Hindley's son Hareton and Edgar and Catherine's daughter Cathy, who appear to have survived not just Heathcliff, but the dangerous passions of the previous generation.
The temptation to rewrite Wuthering Heights is clearly an enticing one, for many besides Hoffman have fallen prey to it. The novel itself has several gaps, which apparently have begged some novelists to fill them. Among others, John Wheatcroft's Catherine, Her Book (Cornwall Books, 1983) provides Catherine Earnshaw's diary, of which only a brief fragment appears in the original novel, while Heathcliff by Jeffrey Caine (Knopf, 1978) and Lin Haire-Sargeant's H: The Story of Heathcliff's Journey Back to Wuthering Heights (Pocket Books, 1992) narrate Heathcliff's three years away.
These books tell us lots of things we don't quite want to know: how Heathcliff is entangled with "Mr. Are," a gentleman in love with his governess, Jane Eyre; how Heathcliff rises from the dead after being hanged for theft; how Heathcliff and Catherine-along with various other characters - have eighteenth-century sex, replete with "titsies" and "tinklers." They explain the unexplained and make literal the implicit sexuality that characterizes the original, but in so doing they remove precisely the ambiguities that make Wuthering Heights itself so entrancing.
Hoffman takes another tack. She lifts the story from the 1780s to the late 1990s, from the moors of Yorkshire to a small town north of Boston. To be precise, she moves it to her own luminous fictional world where perceptions verge on the extrasensory, nature is impeccably observed and succulently rendered, you can hear "peepers, like a living pulse, the background of hot August nights so black and deep they carry you far from peaceful rest and dreams," and a man cries "tears that were so scalding they burned little holes in his face, the scars of which, like pinpricks or small pox, have never faded away."
March Murray returns to Jenkintown with her teenage daughter Gwen to attend the funeral of Judith Dale, the housekeeper who cared for her as a child. As March revisits the places and relationships of her past, we hear the story of the foundling Hollis who "arrived like a bundle of mail," brought home by Mr. Murray from a trip to Boston. We learn how Hollis formed an incendiary attachment to March and was tyrannized by her brother Alan, especially after his father's death.
When Hollis left to seek his fortune, March was broken-hearted. After waiting for three years, she eventually gave up and married Richard Cooper, her gentle, wealthy neighbor, moving with him to California. Hollis returned rich, married Richard's sister Belinda, bought Alan's home out from under him, and settled in as the dominant economic force in town. Sound vaguely familiar?
This, however, is Wuthering Heights as if its first generation had lived: Hindley/Alan to wither away in an alcoholic haze, Catherine/March to return to the young love that should have been left behind. For, of course, March and Hollis reunite, and the novel takes an unfortunate late-nineties turn into the realm of the dysfunctional relationship. We have explicit and earth-shaking sex, but obsession soon leads to abuse, both emotional and physical.
Hollis schemes to get March back and she succumbs. He disables the furnace in her house so that, she and Gwen will come to live with him. That achieved, he steals her mail, cuts the phone lines, wrenches her wrists while accusing her of interest in another man and essentially rapes her. In a daze of desire, she takes it all, till she can't take it anymore.
You don't need to know Wuthering Heights to read Here on Earth - in fact it took me, a Wuthering Heights maven, several chapters to see all the parallels. However, Wuthering Heights sets into plain relief what's wrong with this version.
In the original, Heathcliff is no good guy, but he's powerfully attractive: one of the original dark heroes. Here, we're told that every woman in town wants to sleep with Hollis, that when March first set eyes on him she decided, "From now on, he's mine," that "the air around him seems charged" - but I, for one, don't get it. The guy seems completely unpleasant and March a fool to fall for him, not once, but over and over.
March herself is a pale shade of her original. Catherine Earnshaw is one of the more resistant heroines of Victorian literature: spoiled, willful and passionate. She speaks her mind, perhaps too easily, and she goes all out to get what she wants, namely, Heathcliff. March, on the other hand, is the embodiment of passivity, particularly when it comes to Hollis. She drifts into staying on in Jenkintown after Judith's funeral. She is "completely possessed" by "some demon" when she twice phones Hollis and hangs up. The first time she sees him again, she "is drawn to the Lyon Cafe," where he hangs out. She likes that she "doesn't have to think when she's with him, or make a decision, or state a preference." Without Catherine's desire, control and voice, March is simply an abused woman in love with a domineering jerk.
Despite its temporal and physical transmutations, this novel ultimately, like the other Wuthering Heights remakes, seeks to fill in the gaps, here to answer the question of what might have happened if Catherine and Heathcliff had reunited. Again, the gap seems better left unfilled, if only because so much gets lost in the process. I'm not arguing that great novels rely on their ambiguities, or that the revision is an impossible genre. Certainly Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys' 1966 adaptation of dane Eyre, which gives voice to the first Mrs. Rochester, succeeds brilliantly. But such novels need to have their own impetus. They can't just provide what the original lacks; they must rework the material of the original to their own fictional aims.
Hoffman does this herself in her treatment of Gwen and Hank, Alan's son and Hollis' ward. She renders palpable the shared loneliness of the alienated California teenager and the near-orphan. She makes her reader believe in and care about Gwen's transformation from the sullen, cigarette-smoking girl who "had sex with her last two boyfriends on their first date, if fucking someone in his father's car can be considered a date," to the young woman who tames a near-wild horse and will be "damned if she ends up like her mother, ready to do anything, even lie, for a man." Gwen and Hank have their own redemptive stories that depart significantly from those of their fictional forebears, Cathy and Hareton, and offer a powerful counterpart to their own older generation.
Here on Earth has some other things going for it. Hoffman creates a powerfully evoked community with some strong supporting characters. She offers passages of luminous writing, like the "major turn" Gwen's life takes, "something as rare as planets leaving their orbits to crash into each other and fill up the night," although she also provides some clunkers: "The difference between a lion and a lamb, some might suggest, is in the naming, not in the beast itself. Both are warm-blooded - isn't that a fact?" Huh?
Despite my reservations about Here on Earth, I still like Hoffman and I still think her novels worth reading. It's been interesting to watch her progression from a "mid-list" intellectual novelist, beloved by her readers and gaining a few converts with each regularly produced volume, to a bestseller whose Practical Magic is supposed to be made into a Major Motion Picture starring Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock. I'm not one of those people who bemoan the exposure of their secret loves. I want more people to read Alice Hoffman, and I'm glad they're doing it. Even this one is a better read than most of what's sold on the shelves of airport bookshops.
But if you have never read Hoffman, try Illumination Night or Turtle Moon. If you already know and like her, skip this one and wait for the next. If you want a great read, try Wuthering Heights. If you're intrigued by the idea of novelistic revisions, read dane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. If you're stuck in an airport bookshop, though, confronted with the latest Steele, Grisham and Turow, you could do worse than Here on Earth.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1998 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
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Steinitz, Rebecca. "Here on Earth." The Women's Review of Books, vol. 15, no. 6, Mar. 1998, pp. 6+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A20564232/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=63aa66ad. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Gillian and Sally, the novel's engaging paired protagonists, have hardly experienced an ordinary upbringing. Raised by aunts rumored to be witches, they encounter the hostility of townsfolk and schoolmates and learn to scorn love because it sends so many distraught women scurrying to their aunts' back door in search of spells and potions.
After her husband is inexplicably run over (an event the aunts had foretold), Sally copes by attempting to blend into a suburban landscape while raising her daughters. The flamboyant Gillian simply disappears, linked to her sister only by occasional postcards.
When Gillian surfaces after three divorces, she brings along her boyfriend, Jimmy, "tall, dark, handsome, and dead." Though Sally fears her pursuit of normalcy threatened, she helps Gillian bury Jimmy's body under a lilac hedge. In short order, the lilacs bloom prodigiously: a toad expectorates a missing ring; and Kylie, Sally's youngest daughter, notices a stranger, Jimmy's ghost, loitering in the garden. More importantly, a detective appears even as Jimmy's body threatens to resurface. The aunts - who have disappeared from the narrative - are summoned to perform the practical magic of the novel's title.
Hoffman's likeable novel mimics the plot of many 19th-century narratives using paired protagonists: the "bad" sister emerges as more interesting than the good one. The intrusive authorial voice annoys not simply because it is old-fashioned, but because that voice deals in platitudes and lacks the wryness or acerbity of Fay Weldon. The sisters' love interests, introduced late in the narrative, are such paragons of male virtue that they defy credibility. While Hoffman introduces provocative ideas about love, power, and submission, the contrived happy ending undercuts them.
Suzann Bick
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 Antioch Review, Inc.
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Bick, Suzann. "Practical Magic." The Antioch Review, vol. 54, no. 1, winter 1996, pp. 106+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A18498626/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=246d0d1f. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Alice Hoffman. Putnam, $22.95 (256p) ISBN 0-399-14055-7
Her 11th novel is Hoffman's best since Illumination Night. Again a scrim of magic lies gently over her fictional world, in which lilacs bloom riotously in July, a lovesick boy's elbows sizzle on a diner countertop and a toad expectorates a silver ring. The real and the magical worlds are almost seamlessly mixed here, the humor is sharper than in previous books, the characters' eccentricities grow credibly out of their past experiences and the poignant lessons they learn reverberate against the reader's heartstrings, stroked by Hoffman's lyrical prose. The Owens women have been witches for several generations. Orphaned Sally and Gillian Owens, raised by their spinster aunts in a spooky old house, grow up observing desperate women buying love potions in the kitchen and vow never to commit their hearts to passion. Fate, of course, intervenes. Steady, conscientious Sally marries, has two daughters and is widowed early. Impulsive, seductive Gillian goes through three divorces before she arrives at Sally's house with a dead body in her car. Meanwhile, Sally's daughters, replicas of their mother and their aunt, experience their own sexual awakenings. The inevitability of love and the torment and bliss of men and women gripped by desire is Hoffman's theme here, and she plays those variations with a new emphasis on sex scenes-there's plenty of steamy detail and a pervasive use of the fword. The dialogue is always on target, particularly the squabbling between siblings, and, as usual, weather plays a portentous role. Readers will relish this magical tale. BOMC main selection. (June)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1995 PWxyz, LLC
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"Practical Magic." Publishers Weekly, vol. 242, no. 12, 20 Mar. 1995, p. 40. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A16682413/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=600bce73. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
There's nothing quite so comforting as finding a new book by a favorite author waiting for you in the bookstore. (Unless it's a heretofore unknown book by said author that you stumble across by some happy accident, but that's another story. Alice Hoffman is one such author for me as those of you with long memories might remember since discussed her novel Turtle Moon (1992) in my first installment of this column.
Turtle Moon was a sort of magical realist mystery/ghost story. She followed that with last year's Second Nature, her own take on the "feral child" story where an infant is taken in by wild animals (in this case wolves) and raised by them in the wild. This time out she has set her sights on witches and the "practical magic" we more normally associate with old wives' tales and superstition.
Our cast is mostly composed of three generations of the Owens women: the aunts who remain ciphers until the end of the book; sisters Gillian and Sally, the former is wild and quickly flees her strange upbringing through a series of bad marriages and affairs, the latter also flees, but she does so to find a normal life in suburbia; and Sally's daughters, Antonia and Kylie.
The first part of the book deals with Gillian and Sally growing up in the aunts' house. I can't quite put my finger on why, but in some ways, it's the least appealing part -- mostly because there's something in Hoffman's style at this point of the story that distances the readers from the characters. Too much telling us how things are, rather than trusting her writing to show us why the characters react to situations as they do and what motivates them to flee the house.
But this is only the first forty pages or so and the greater part of the novel retains Hoffman's usual warm prose, insightful characterization and whimsical sense of incident and plot. Things heat up when, after not seeing each other for eighteen years, Gillian shows up on Sally's doorstep with a dead man in her car -- her abusive boyfriend Jimmy, killed by Gillian while she was trying to tame the nasty side of his nature through small doses of nightshade.
Whatever differences the sisters might have, Sally can't turn Gillian away. They bury Jimmy's body under the lilac bushes in the back yard and try to continue on with their lives. But now everything's changed. The presence of the corpse makes the lilacs bloom long into summer and soon Jimmy makes his presence felt in other, unpleasant ways. The sisters begin to bicker and tension runs high in the household, particularly since Sally's daughters are bringing their own problems to the equation: Antonia's sudden drop in popularity makes her miserable while Kylie is just entering puberty and anyone with children or good memories knows what kind of a spin that can put on an already tense household. And I haven't even gotten into all the small magics and the like that wind their way through the story.
How things work out you'll have to find out for yourself ... and I hope you do, if only to introduce yourself to Hoffman's work. Her prose is by turns charmingly whimsical and darkly sensual, while her sense of the pitfalls and joys of human relationships -- those we form with ourselves as much as with others -- and her ability to convey them to her readers is matchless.
Practical Magic is her eleventh novel to date and frankly she has yet to write a bad book; each one seems more inspired than the one preceding it. She's not writing big stories. The world isn't in peril, the universe goes on, no matter what happens to her characters. But she invests such insight and truthfulness in her writing that the stories gain weight the same way the small incidents in our own lives often overshadow the larger concerns of the world around us.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1995 Spilogale, Inc.
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de Lint, Charles. "Practical Magic." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, vol. 89, no. 6, Dec. 1995, pp. 46+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A17510744/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7dac1dce. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Alice Hoffman's forte is delving under the bland mask of suburban tranquility to ferret out the dark secrets that lie behind the trimmed lawns and hedges, the bungalows and condos. She did so with a gentle touch reminiscent of Anne Tyler in her last novel, Seventh Heaven (1990) set in the 1950s when suburbia was considered to be the promised land. This time out, the knife cuts a little deeper as Hoffman combines the sensibility of her earlier novels with the suspense of a crime novel.
Turtle Moon is set in a small Florida town made up mostly of divorcees and retirees. The cast is a rich blend of child/adult relationships: between divorcee Lucy Rosen and her estranged son Keith who has all the makings of a juvenile delinquent; between policeman Julian Cash, taciturn and only at ease with his dogs, and Miss Giles, the woman who raised him when he was orphaned; and between Cash and Keith, a relationship that seems to owe as much to Cash's guilt over the death of his cousin Bobby as it does Keith's needs.
The novel is kick-started with the murder of one of Lucy Rosen's neighbors. Her son Keith hears the woman being killed and flees with the victim's infant daughter; and that sets off the hunt. The killer wants to eliminate Keith, the witness. Cash wants Keith, who looks good for the woman's murder. Rosen sets off to track down the real killer to clear her son's name.
Hoffman manages to both retain her lyrical prose style, yet keep the tension high as befits a suspense novel. Her characters are beautifully constructed, flaws and all, as are the settings, especially Verity, Florida. And as in her previous book, Seventh Heaven, there's a light touch of a fantasy element to underlie a deeper resonance to all the goings-on.
Hoffman's take on fantasy isn't likely to appeal to the reader eagerly anticipating princesses being rescued from evil wizards by a talking unicorn. It owes more to magical realism, adding a deeper insight into the human condition, rather than serving as a flashy plot device. There is a warmth and a genuine sense of wonder to the mystical relationship that forms between Keith and Cash's monstrous dog Arrow, an animal so vicious that Cash himself can't pet it. A similar sureness of the author's hand illuminates the presence of the ghost of Bobby Cash, bound to the gumbo-limbo tree where he died twenty years ago in a car crash, the vehicle driven by his cousin Julian.
Turtle Moon has a little of everything for everyone: lyric prose and action scenes, suspense and romance, social commentary and an attempt to understand human motivations and relationships in literate terms. That Hoffman can juggle all these disparate elements and fit them into a seamless whole begins as a testament to her skill as a writer and ends with her readers' great delight.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 Spilogale, Inc.
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de Lint, Charles. "Turtle Moon." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, vol. 86, no. 4, Apr. 1994, pp. 33+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A14904382/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=afc48e77. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
TURTLE MOON Alice Hoffman. Putnam, $21.95 ISBN 0-399-13720-3 Combining aspects of a suspense thriller and a romance, and including such surefire elements as an abandoned baby, a youngster on the verge of juvenile delinquency who is reformed, two dogs and a supernatural character who provides the requisite touch of fantasy, Hoffman's new novel has commercial success written all over it. But some readers will fail to find the enchantment provided in such previous works as Illumination Night and Seventh Heaven. The town of Verity, Fla., starts to steam up in May, when the humidity and temperature soar. (Among the things readers must accept is the dreadful, oppressive May heat; one is tempted to ask, if it's so unbearable in May, how do people live through the summer?) Verity is full of divorcees, and when one of them is murdered, Keith Rosen, "Verity's meanest 12-year-old," finds her baby, who was in fact the object of an aborted kidnapping, and runs away, instinctively hiding the threatened child. This development brings together Keith's divorced mother, Lucy, and the town's surly policeman, Julian Cash, a loner with a tragedy in his past. Despite the murder and a stalking assassin, this is really a fairy tale: Keith bonds with the baby and tames a vicious dog ("No one has ever known him the way this dog does"); a ghost/angel falls in love and brings redemption to Julian, and several people begin new lives. Hoffman lards her slick plot with ponderously sentimental observations, the kind of bromides that could be embroidered on a pillow. But she knows how to manipulate suspense and tug the heartstrings; with its cinematic flow and larger-than-life characters, her novel will make a wonderful movie. BOMC main selection; QPB alternate; film rights to Universal. (May)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1992 PWxyz, LLC
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"Turtle Moon." Publishers Weekly, vol. 239, no. 7, 3 Feb. 1992, p. 61. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A11863558/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1d16cf51. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
SECOND NATURE
Alice Hoffman. Putnam, $22.95 (256p) ISBN 0-399-13908-7
Beguiled by her seductive prose and her imaginative virtuosity, readers have always been willing to suspend disbelief and enjoy the touches of magic in Hoffman's novels (Illumination Night; Turtle Moon, etc). Here, credibility is stretched not by magical intervention but by the implausibility of a major character. When a feral young man is discovered living with wolves in a remote area of upper Michigan, he cannot speak and can barely remember his early life. Transferred to a hospital in Manhattan, he does not utter a sound and is on his way to being incarcerated in a mental institution until divorced landscape designer Robin Moore impulsively hustles him into her pickup truck and carries him to the sanctuary of her home on an island in Nassau County. There the Wolf Man reveals that his name is Stephen and that he was the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed his parents when he was three-and-a-half years old; thereafter he lived with a wolf pack. Within three months Robin teaches Stephen to read; soon afterwards they begin a passionate affair. How Stephen can so easily expand the small vocabulary he had mastered at a tender age but has never used since, how suddenly he can deal with sophisticated concepts, speak in grammatical sentences and even observe the social graces, is the central flaw that undermines what is otherwise a highly engaging tale. Stephen's presence in the community causes various people to reassess their lives; then there is a tragedy involving a child, (a device that is beginning to be a pattern in Hoffman's novels, as are strange changes in climate that herald a significant event). Hoffman's keen appraisal of human nature and her graceful prose do much to keep this novel appealing; but the bedrock implausibility may deter readers from whole-hearted enjoyment. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1993 PWxyz, LLC
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"Second Nature." Publishers Weekly, vol. 240, no. 48, 29 Nov. 1993, p. 53. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A14602974/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=331633ec. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
SEVENTH HEAVEN
In 1959, when Alice Hoffman's latest novel, Seventh Heaven, begins, I was 11 years old, with an aunt whom, even at my sexually unripened age, I understood as dangerous, in contradictory ways, to married men and women. She was unconscionably beautiful, stylish beyond prudence, a 1950s Cleopatra. The men had no resistance; the women, my mother among them, had plenty. Wittingly or not, my aunt threatened the order and safety of things, the theoretic inviolability of marriage and family. She was too alluring, too sexy, liked men and dancing--what could be worse? She belonged in New York. Even my uncle, in a jealous rage one summer night, placed a white styrofoam head, her wig still on it, beside the swimming pool and coolly sent a bullet through it. Women like my aunt, women like Hoffman's heroine, Nora Silk, scarcely realizing what demons of malcontent they unleash, are anathema, unconscious repudiations of domesticity. These are the female pariahs, enchantresses, seductresses. In a Western society equating eros with evil, they are modern-day sorceresses.
Indeed, Alice Hoffman is wittily direct in her equation of Nora Silk with the community witch. She dresses in black; her eyes are described as blacker than black; two of her neighbors, one obsessively lusting after her, the other a neighborhood Elvis who will become her lover, first see Nora shortly after she has moved into their pristine subdivision, on her roof in predawn darkness with a broom, cleaning leaves from the gutter. Three crows and a black cat, the burning of waxen effigies, witchery and intimations of witchery abound, and Nora, enticing to husbands, suspected by wives, is ominous as a medieval coven huddled on a crossroads at midnight.
In Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, another Nora renounced her domestic incarceration, a theatrically thrilling moment that still reverberates, the slam of the door still echoing. Yet here is her sister, Nora Silk, in 1959, traveling the opposite direction, beating down suburban doors, pleading admission to a retentively ordered tract-home paradise, a Seventh Heaven, seven the symbol of perfect order and, more ominously, of plain.
Nora Silk exits off the Southern State Parkway in a beat-up Volkswagen with her 8-year-old son, Billy, and baby, James; she's freshly divorced and desperate to find a place in that ubiquitous dream of the 1950s, analgesic to America's post-Bomb guilt, the suburbs, where external order and addictive neatness prevail, where the two unspoken rules are Mind your own business and Tend to your lawn. Ironically, Nora is inwardly conventional, admitting to herself she would have put up with her two-timing magician husband had he not abandoned her. But Nora--that most lethal of subdivision prowlers, a divorcee--with her toreador pants, Elvis collection and Ambush perfume, sets down startling roots in the prefab heaven of Hemlock Street. Her first act, moving in on a hot August afternoon, is to bake cookies. Indeed, throughout the novel, Nora tries baking her way into acceptance. Macaroni and cheese, tuna and noodles, meatloaf, junket and rice puddings, Bosco: This is the blandest diet on earth, but Nora is determined to get the recipes right. She supports herself and the boys selling ladies' magazine subscriptions, working as a manicurist at the local beauty salon and distributing that latest household statement, Tupperware. Here is terrain Hoffman has traversed in previous novels such as At Risk and Illumination Night, revealing tender points of emotional connection between individuals, families and neighborhoods. Ordinary is scarcely mundane, she insists, her characters' deceptively simple lives, and thereby our own, fraught with opportunity for transformation and revelation. Compassionate rather than dispassionate, Alice Hoffman's greatest strength is her unabashed advocacy of the healing power of human love.
Yet beneath the pervasive, relentless scent of Bon Ami, Airwick and Lysol, back of the tidy conviction that not only is cleanliness next to godliness, it is godliness, there is fierce xenophobia, a thick atmosphere of repressed desire and fear of change. Nora and her eldest son are deliberate outcasts, cruelly snubbed. In a place where the color scarlet it tolerated only in the maraschino cherries that dot the junket pies and tapioca puddings, Nora's vermilion nails blare out a disturbing, unwanted message. Indeed, she has an uncanny gift for matching color to client in the beauty salon, blithely advising the women to toss out their humdrum pinks and opt for the brightest oranges, flaming scarlets, vivid fuchsias.
On a street so new it resembles a Monopoly board, named Hemlock after a lethal respiratory narcotic, live the families we witness, the magic of Nora Silk working on them. Joe Hennessy, the dependable policeman, and his wife, Ellen, who would rather scrub the oven burners than make love to her husband; the McCarthy boys, mock delinquents in black leather and fast cars, their girlfriends swooning but stubbornly chaste, and their father, the Saint, who owns the local Texaco; the perfect, perfectly well-off Shapiros--Danny, their high-school boy, smart, athletic and poignantly lonely, and Rickie, their faultlessly pretty, morally bewildered coed; the Durgins, Donna Durgin dieting off so much fat in search of her hidden self that she literally vanishes.
A hazy corona of clairvoyance, an aura of the supernatural, envelops Hemlock Street. Ghosts are seen, voices heard, events eerily anticipated before they happen. Under an antiseptic Pine Sol Surface, despite watery, pastel casseroles, Bermuda shorts and Peter Pan collars, lurks the unclean morass of cruelty, dishonesty and violence. Nora's 8-year-old is tormented at school, a crime allowed to flourish as long as adults persist in distortedly viewing childhood as an innocent, benign landscape. But the real victim of Seventh Heaven is young Cathy Corrigan, opposite of homecoming queen, opposite of Rickie Shapiro, scapegoated as the town slut. After her accidental death under degrading circumstances, her blond specter haunts Hemlock Street's guilty inhabitants.
As time and events wear on, Alice Hoffman delineates effects both overt and subtle of Nora's spell on these families. The women turn openly inquisitive about her life, her work, her independence and unself-conscious sensuality. Sex before Nora was murky terrain better left to teenagers in parked cars. In these identical houses, it has been diluted into twin beds by a kind of voiceless impotence, and sublimated into well-intentioned but fanatic cleanliness. Nora works like an imported aphrodisiac on these families. She is young Ace McCarthy's clandestine lover, his guide and answer out of the suburbs; indeed, with her subtle encouragement, he exits the insular world of Hemlock Street by the same parkway she had so determinedly entered a year before.
By the end of Seventh Heaven, Nora Silk sits in the bleachers wearing Bermuda shorts, watching her son Billy play baseball, both of them finally assimilated into this outwardly wholesome community. Though no longer persecuted, Nora is still alone and the decade of the 1950s is over, the days of Elvis and the McCarthy boys in tight black pants and souped-up cars and swooning girls giving way to images of Danny Shapiro's newly acquired taste for marijuana, and the women's burgeoning feminist discontent. Nora, wishing only to please and placate, has innocently helped unravel a brief, artificially halcyon era, its smug assumption of safety and neutered, lawn-scented naivete. Well-meaning husbands and wives, their lives slipping by in routing and predictable season, worn to slivers mild as Ivory soap, are startled awake as life, messy, parlous, exciting, fertile, in the goddess incarnation of Nora Silk, moves in, and nothing, ever, is quite the same.
In a wickedly deft reversal, Hoffman indicates the irony of Nora Silk's triumph. How easily one pictures Nora, long after the neighborhood women have formed consciousness-raising groups, gone off to jobs and back to school, baking up a relentless storm, getting the recipes right just as the appetite for them is gone. As for my aunt, there was a scandal, a divorce, and she vanished from the family. I imagine her navigating colorless freeways in a red convertible, circling with purgatorial restlessness a neighborhood where the bland redolence of Nora Silk's casseroles floats like Muzak above meticulous, well-tended lawns.
Melissa Pritchard is author of the Flannery O'Connor Award-Winning story collection Spirit Seizures (Macmillan) and a forthcoming novel, Phoenix (Cane Hill Press).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1990 The Nation Company L.P.
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Pritchard, Melissa. "Seventh Heaven." The Nation, vol. 251, no. 18, 26 Nov. 1990, pp. 650+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A9100540/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b2dd0544. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.