Alice Hoffman is my favourite author. I can't even wait to get my hands on her books the second they come out! To be given the opportunity to read and review this book was truly thrilling for me.
Hoffman's writing is a living thing. Her stories breathe and grow and as the reader, you transcend. Her characters are layered and complex, her writing is rich and incredibly moving, it is fluid.
That being said, I missed the magical realism associated with Hoffman because I don't think that this novel had enough of it, or rather didn't seem to have any other than the reference of an angel which unfortunately for this book, becomes a character—this is not classic Hoffman.
While this story was not one of my favourites that she has written, it was indeed a page-turner and I'm so glad I got to read it because everything she writes is gold.
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ALICE HOFFMAN has a BA from Adelphi University and an MA in creative writing from Stanford University.
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. Since that remarkable beginning, Alice Hoffman has become one of our 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 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 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 the New York Times bestseller The Ice Queen. In 2007 Little Brown published the teen novel Incantation, a story about hidden Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, which Publishers Weekly has chosen as one of the best books of the year.
Her works have been published in more than twenty translations and more than one hundred foreign editions. Hoffman's 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.
She currently lives in Boston and New York.
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