Normally, stories which switch narrators mid-stream annoy me. "The dovekeepers" was going down that road, but Alice hoffman did a very good job of connecting the characters and making each of their stories gripping. I was entertained by the novel; moreover, i truly believe myself a smarter man ...
I wanted to give this 3.5 stars. The prose was beautiful, even lyrical. Hoffman's descriptions of the time were lush and transporting. It helps that she could have been describing the history of my own people (Jewish immigrant experience, Coney Island, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory), so I was pu...
Excellent author - excellent book! Usually, when I listen to an audio book I find myself distracted at some point and have to back up and listen to that part again. Not with Alice Hoffman books. I wouldn't call this an upbeat story by any stretch of the imagination and the beginning of the boo...
I loved all the different stories throughout time. Good, like all her stuff, but was much more like a set of short stories than a novel.
This book was an awesome book, it was the second book to a series of three. Alice Hoffman is an amazing writer, she writes poetically and has a flow with her writing. The main character Green is finally over the death of her family and goes to help her friend Heather and her true love Diamond. Gr...
Choose Your HeroesChoose to Enjoy YourselfChoose Your FriendsChoose whose advice you takeChoose your relativesChoose how you spend your timeChoose to plan for the future …"Write your troubles on a slip of paper and burn it. Now make a list of all the things you want to do next year." Choose to L...
Certainly an interesting concept of centering a collection of short stories taking place over time around a single location. However, by the end I was just hoping it would finish soon. A single, well-fleshed out novel about any one of the stories may have been a better bet. As they stand now, the...
I'm between a 3 and 4 stars on this one. It's very poetic and very symbolic. It's about finding oneself, dealing with loss, finding hope and the will to go on. I likes how her tattoos changed color as she came back to herself. I liked the second part more than the first. I liked how everyone had ...
Beautiful treatment of some familiar themes: "coming home" and "abusive relationships". March Murray returns to her childhood home when the woman who was her caretaker - nanny, housekeeper, cook - dies. Judith Dale took over when March's mother died when March was very young, and stayed in the fa...
(Please note: my rating is actually three and a half stars)Anyone who mistakenly thinks reading an Alice Hoffman novel will be a light and enjoyable bit of fluff, has obviously never read one. Even at her most buoyant and optimistic, Ms. Hoffman writes books that will haunt you forever. And "Skyl...
The day the books burned in the plaza, Estrella’s life began to change. She caught her first glimpse of a different side of her best friend. She felt the evilness which had come up and inhabited her town. She saw a part of her mother that scared her the same way her grandmother always had.Estrell...
For three hundred years, when a Sparrow girl reaches thirteen years of age, she receives her "gift", which at times may seem like more of a curse. The first Sparrow girl, Rebecca, received the gift of being unable to feel pain, which ultimately led to her being tortured and weighted down by rock...
Author: Alice HoffmanTitle: Green AngelGenre: magical realism, tale of survivalPublication Info: Scholastic. New York. 2003.Recommended Age: 13 and olderPlot Summary: Green, a moody, introspective 15-year-old, stays at home while her parents and younger sister travel to the city to sell their veg...
When I read this, I was ready for another Alice Hoffman book. She takes the ordinary world, makes it completely awful, and then pulls all of the magic and wonder out of it, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. I have several Alice Hoffman books on my sagging Kindle bookshelves and not sur...
How capable are we of change? This is the question Alice Hoffman asks in her novel, Blue Diary. Ethan Ford, a seemingly handsome and harmless gentleman, is actually a criminal who has been on the run for the past thirteen years for the murder and rape of a young girl. The plot blooms as his hi...
My first taste of Alice Hoffman's writing and for me, this book at least was mediocre in both content and enjoyment factor. At the start of the book I felt it was going really well and I was looking forward to more of the same but the book kind of derails and gets overcrowded with too many charac...
Good story. Kind of sad but redemptive. The story of the effects of psychological and physical abuse on a person's psyche and their ability to cope with life. This story was unique in that we see these effects on a male character as opposed to the usual portrait of a female abuse victim. Michael ...
I loved the unique and odd characters. I hated the ending which left me grieving for days.STORY BRIEF:Karen is divorced with a baby. She is on the run from her ex-husband and moves to Verity, Florida. Twelve-year-old Keith is the meanest boy in town and lives with his divorced mother Lucy. Ju...
Places have much greater permanence than people. Land exists for eons (now don’t get picky about ocean fronts migrating and the Big Island expanding. You know what I mean) whereas people last mere generations, and often much less. On the surface at least, Blackbird House is a novel of place, in ...
The River King took awhile for me to get into. At first the characters didn't interest me. I didn't care about the ghost story, the deceased horrible professor and his wife that never ran away (but should have), and all the crotchety adults that seemed to settle for their unhappy lives in a desol...
As I write this, I'm in a reading slump. Again. The other books in my "currently reading" list are boring the ever-loving crap out of me.Recently, our village library had their annual book sale and I picked this up in hardback for two bucks. Why? Because, even at her worst, Alice Hoffman is emine...
Reading The Ice Queen was definitely not an easy read, but it kept me on my toes wanting more and more. The book began with a rush of events that boggled my mind in the beginning because this was the very first time that I had I read a book of its kinds in a great deal of time. The book was about...