November 6, 2006
In Hoffman's 19th novel, a young woman becomes the victim of the destiny she's created, leaving behind a splintered family. On the day of her father's funeral, 17-year-old Arlyn Singer decides the first man who walks down the street will be her one love. That night, Yale senior John Moody stops to ask directions, and Arlyn and John take the first passionate steps toward what will become a marriage of heartache and mutual betrayal. After John's architect father dies, the couple moves into his Connecticut home, a glass house called the Glass Slipper, and Arlyn has an affair with a local laborer. She dies while her second child is still young, and the story forks to follow the divergent paths taken by the Moody children. Sam, the self-destructive first-born, spray paints his angst all over lower Manhattan and has a son before disappearing. Blanca, Sam's sister and the only family member he loves, moves to London and opens a bookstore. John remarries, to Cynthia, and has another daughter, but carries a family secret with him to his grave. Ghostly apparitions lend an air of dark enchantment, though the numerous dream sequences feel heavy-handed.
October 1, 2006
A Connecticut ferryboat captain dies, leaving his motherless 17-year-old daughter, Arlyn, an orphan. On the day of his funeral, red-haired Arlie invites fate into her homeand her bedin the form of John Moody, a lost Yale student of architecture, thus cementing a multigenerational dance of misery. Moody spent three days loving Arlie and a lifetime resenting their marriage. And he has little interest in their son, Sam, a fragile little boy devoted to his mother. It is Sams train wreck of an adolescence that is at the heart of Hoffmans 19th novel. Arlies early death strands Sam; baby Blanca; Arlies lover, George Snow; and even Moody in separate emotional hells. They are only partially saved by the appearance of Meredith, a college student who follows Arlies ghost to the Moody home and signs on as the nanny. Hoffmans gift for framing otherworldly elements in down-to-earth language intensifies the flawed resolve of the tragic Moodys as they desperately pummel their way through loss and grief and, maybe, redemption. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 9/15/06.]"Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI"
Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
October 1, 2006
Hoffman works with her own private deck of tarot cards to create psychologically rich, mystical tales infused with a sexy form of magic realism sprung from the union of romance and tragedy. In her latest gothic fairy tale of doomed passion and indelible guilt, Arlyn, 17, is utterly alone in the world until, like a mermaid casting her spell over a lost sailor, she pulls John Moody into her orbit and refuses to let go. A student at Yale, he is the lackluster son of an architect famous for building a Connecticut house known as the Glass Slipper. In a sinister variation on the nursery rhyme about the woman who lived in a shoe, the mismatched couple dwell precariously in the comfortless glass mansion with their solemn son, Sam, and, later, a daughter, Blanca, who isn't even a year old when cancer claims Arlyn. But death doesn't dispel Arlyn's powers. As birds inexplicitly flock to the Glass Slipper, dishes break without being touched, and soot rains down, Sam, a promising artist, loses his way in a labyrinth of narcotics, even as help arrives in the form of a young woman also haunted by her dead. Hoffman's shimmering, multigenerational melodrama bewitches with supernatural imagery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)
February 26, 2007
Winningham's narration is just right. Her pronunciation is clear but not exaggerated, and nicely combined with the rhythmic, conversational speed of a good storyteller. She has a rich voice with a good vocal range. This book is another of the wildly popular "ghost" romances that come under the rubric "woman's fiction," and another of Hoffman's dark fairy tales. Orphaned at 17, Arlie determines to love and marry the first man who comes down the street. This is John Moody, a "distant, quiet man" who ignores her and her children throughout their marriage, but is plagued by her ghost after her early death. Arlie's ghost is visible only to Moody and to the narrator, Meredith, who follows the ghost home to the glass house where Arlie lived out her miserable marriage and died. The book is loaded with telltale names and laborious symbols—ashes, dishes, stones, bones, birds, glass and all things red or white—but the characters are as human as fairy tale permits, and Hoffman's prose is lively and absorbing. This book will be a favorite of women's fiction and Hoffman fans. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 6).