Over the past couple of months, I have been alternating between working on my latest novel and reading. Like some people binge on a Netflix series, I have been bingeing on Alice Hoffman books. Since The Red Garden, which I read and reviewed previously, I was hooked. I can't believe I've been reading all these years without finding these magical books by this talented writer. Thank goodness I'm finally reading them!
Since I am intent on finishing writing my novel, I haven't had time to review each of these books individually. But who am I kidding - they are all 5-Star reads! So instead, I am only going to share the ones I've read so far with you in the hope that if you haven't been lucky enough to read Alice Hoffman's books, you'll try them.
Here we go...
On Hemlock Street, the houses are identical, the lawns tidy, and the families traditional. A perfect slice of suburbia, this Long Island community shows no signs of change as the 1950s draw to a close—until the fateful August morning when Nora Silk arrives.
Recently divorced, Nora mows the lawn in sling-back pumps and climbs her roof in the middle of the night to clean the gutters. She works three jobs, and when her casseroles don’t turn out, she feeds her two boys—eight-year-old Billy and his baby brother, James—Frosted Flakes for supper. She wears black stretch pants instead of Bermuda shorts, owns twenty-three shades of nail polish, and sings along to Elvis like a schoolgirl.
Though Nora is eager to fit in on Hemlock Street, her effect on the neighbors is anything but normal. The wives distrust her, the husbands desire her, and the children think she’s a witch. But through Nora’s eyes, the neighborhood appears far from perfect. Behind every neatly trimmed hedge and freshly painted shutter is a family struggling to solve its own unique mysteries. Inspired by Nora, the residents of Hemlock Street finally unlock the secrets that will transform their lives forever.
A tale of extraordinary discoveries, Seventh Heaven is an ode to a single mother’s heroic journey and a celebration of the courage it takes to change.
(My note: I loved
this story. On the outside, people try to pretend that their lives are perfect
but you never knows what goes on in the houses on your block. Vivid characters.
I think it’s one of Ms. Hoffman’s best!)
Blackbird House
With “incantatory prose” that “sweeps over the reader like a
dream,” (Philadelphia Inquirer), Hoffman follows her celebrated
bestseller The Probable Future, with an evocative work that traces the
lives of the various occupants of an old Massachusetts house over a span of two
hundred years.
In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the characters we meet: Violet, a brilliant girl who is in love with books and with a man destined to betray her; Lysander Wynn, attacked by a halibut as big as a horse, certain that his life is ruined until a boarder wearing red boots
arrives to change everything; Maya Cooper, who does not understand the true meaning of the love between her mother and father until it is nearly too late. From the time of the British occupation of Massachusetts to our own modern world, family after family’s lives are inexorably changed, not only by the people they love but by the lives they lead inside Blackbird House.
These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one lasting element in our lives. The past both dissipates and remains contained inside the rooms of Blackbird House, where there are terrible secrets, inspired beauty, and, above all else, a spirit of coming home.
From the writer Time has said tells "truths powerful enough to break a reader’s heart” comes a glorious travelogue through time and fate, through loss and love and survival. Welcome to Blackbird House.
In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the characters we meet: Violet, a brilliant girl who is in love with books and with a man destined to betray her; Lysander Wynn, attacked by a halibut as big as a horse, certain that his life is ruined until a boarder wearing red boots
arrives to change everything; Maya Cooper, who does not understand the true meaning of the love between her mother and father until it is nearly too late. From the time of the British occupation of Massachusetts to our own modern world, family after family’s lives are inexorably changed, not only by the people they love but by the lives they lead inside Blackbird House.
These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one lasting element in our lives. The past both dissipates and remains contained inside the rooms of Blackbird House, where there are terrible secrets, inspired beauty, and, above all else, a spirit of coming home.
From the writer Time has said tells "truths powerful enough to break a reader’s heart” comes a glorious travelogue through time and fate, through loss and love and survival. Welcome to Blackbird House.
The Probable Future
Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people’s dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window on the future—a future that she might not want to see.
In The Probable Future this vivid and intriguing cast of characters confronts a haunting past—and a very current murder—against the evocative backdrop of small-town New England. By turns chilling and enchanting, The Probable Future chronicles the Sparrows’s legacy as young Stella struggles to cope with her disturbing clairvoyance. Her potential to ruin or redeem becomes unbearable when one of her premonitions puts her father in jail, wrongly accused of homicide. Yet this ordeal also leads Stella to the grandmother she was forbidden to meet and to a historic family home full of talismans from her ancestors.
Poignant, arresting, unsettling, The Probable Future showcases the lavish literary gifts that have made Alice Hoffman one of America’s most treasured writers.
The Ice Queen
Be careful what you
wish for. A woman who was touched by tragedy as a child now lives a quiet life,
keeping other people at a cool distance. She even believes she wants it that
way. Then one day she utters an idle wish and, while standing in her house, is
struck by lightning. But instead of ending her life, this cataclysmic event
sparks a strange and powerful new beginning. After the lightning strike, the
chill in her spirit starts to have physical manifestations. She feels frozen
from the inside out, and everything red looks as colorless as snow. Hearing of
a fellow lightning-strike survivor - a man who was apparently dead for forty
minutes, then simply got up and walked away - she goes in search of him.
Perhaps Lazarus Jones, as he is known, can teach her to live without fear. He
turns out to be her perfect opposite, a man whose breath can boil water and
whose touch scorches. As an obsessive love affair begins between them, both
hide their most dangerous secrets - what happened in the past that turned one
to ice and the other to fire. And everyone in her fragile network of friends
and family will be drawn into the conflagration of their joining. Alice Hoffman
has written a magical story of passion, loss, and renewal. With a sparseness
and immediacy that only a master could achieve, she illuminates the bonds and
mysteries that connect mother and daughter, sister and brother, woman and man.
Practical Magic
My
note: (You’ve seen the movie – so why read the book? Because the book is
different than the movie, beautifully written, and gives you so much more of
the story than the movie does. A must read!)
For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in their Massachusetts town. Gillian and Sally have endured that fate as well: as children, the sisters were forever outsiders, taunted, talked about, pointed at. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, with their musty house and their exotic concoctions and their crowd of black cats. But all Gillian and Sally wanted was to escape.
One will do so by marrying, the other by running away. But the bonds they share will bring them back—almost as if by magic...
“Splendid...Practical Magic is one of [Hoffman's] best novels, showing on every page her gift for touching ordinary life as if with a wand, to reveal how extraordinary life really is.”—Newsweek
For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in their Massachusetts town. Gillian and Sally have endured that fate as well: as children, the sisters were forever outsiders, taunted, talked about, pointed at. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, with their musty house and their exotic concoctions and their crowd of black cats. But all Gillian and Sally wanted was to escape.
One will do so by marrying, the other by running away. But the bonds they share will bring them back—almost as if by magic...
“Splendid...Practical Magic is one of [Hoffman's] best novels, showing on every page her gift for touching ordinary life as if with a wand, to reveal how extraordinary life really is.”—Newsweek
Buy
now on Kindle, Paperback, Hardcover, or Audiobook formats.
Cheers,
Deanna
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