Helpful Score: 2
This is a great book that is 100% the Alice Hoffman I love. 200 years of family stories and lessons learned in one small northern town. Hoffman can take the simplest of things and make them mysterious. If you love Hoffman as I do, you will love this book. One thing that I didn't like was that The Truth About My Mother was a recycled story from another one of her books (Blackbird House?). It's a great story, but I didn't like hearing it again with another family. This book is almost a book of short stories, but few can weave together to make one story as AH does. Great book!
Excellent collection of stories. Each stands alone as a wonderful short story, yet they all take place in the same small town just in different times in history. This makes for one big ongoing collection of stories from the beginning of the towns inception to modern day. Each character is interestingly related in some way to some former character in the previous stories. Very detailed and emotional and intriquing settings and situations. I loved it - one of Alice Hoffmans best!
So enchanting I didn't want it to end. I loved the way the chapters were loosely strung along the wire of history, relating to the same place and many of the same families. There's a full range of irony, heartbreak, joy and life dilemmas in these stories, not one of which is conventional or predictable. My favorite episode was one where a New York City writer during the Depression comes to the town on a WPA project looking for local color and keeps on overlooking the very best story in the town. And I loved the recurring themes of people who feel they didn't belong, leaving town or living out in the woods, as well as the motifs of bears, eels, gardens and more. Simply magical!
Love Alice Hoffman. However, this was not my favorite Alice Hoffman book. It started out great. I enjoyed how each chapter was like its own story, yet still connected through generations of people. As the book continued, the chapters got more and more strange and less enjoyable.
It was confusing at first but I finally realized it was in some ways more about the place than following each person's life. I'm not much for magical realism but I really did enjoy reading this book and it was very well written.
I love Alice Hoffman's work, but you have to be a diehard fan to love this or even finish it. I found it so boring that I couldn't get past the first 75 pages or so. I've been disappointed with her last few efforts and I doubt that I'll rush to pick up any of her future books.
Alice Hoffman has been one of my favorites, but this book, I have to admit I did not even finish!
Couldn't get into this book. I got half way and had to put it down and had no interest in picking it back up. Ill rate this book on how I felt through half of the book. A 2 and a half stars.
