7.29.2010

Reading Thursday: Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman is an author who I try out here and again and I never know whether or not I will be bored or absolutely love the book. I loved Practical Magic (book and movie), was bored with The Probable Future and absolutely LOVED Blackbird House.

This book is a series of stories or vignettes about the families and people that live on one particular piece of land, and one house, over the course of a hundred years or so. The stories are often bittersweet, and can sometimes end abruptly - but not in a bad way. Hoffman's writing in these stories is phenomenal, lyrical, haunting, moving.... The mood of the stories can be sad at times, happy at others, but always intriguing. I did not end the book feeling sad, I felt inspired in a strange way.

From BN.com:

"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."

Have you read this book, or anything else by Alice Hoffman? What do you recommend I read next by her? 

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