Book-It 'o14! Book #52
The Fifty Books Challenge, year five! ( 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013) This was a library request.
Title: The Probable Future by Alice Hoffman
Details: Copyright 2003, Random House Publishing
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap):
"Alice Hoffman’s most magical novel to date-three generations of extraordinary women are driven to unite in crisis and discover the rewards of reconciliation and love.
Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people’s dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window on the future-a future that she might not want to see.
In The Probable Future this vivid and intriguing cast of characters confronts a haunting past-and a very current murder-against the evocative backdrop of small-town New England. By turns chilling and enchanting, The Probable Future chronicles the Sparrows’s legacy as young Stella struggles to cope with her disturbing clairvoyance. Her potential to ruin or redeem becomes unbearable when one of her premonitions puts her father in jail, wrongly accused of homicide. Yet this ordeal also leads Stella to the grandmother she was forbidden to meet and to a historic family home full of talismans from her ancestors.
Poignant, arresting, unsettling, The Probable Future showcases the lavish literary gifts that have made Alice Hoffman one of America’s most treasured writers."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Working my way through Alice Hoffman's catalog has yielded some pleasant surprises and some pleasant not-such-a-surprises.
How I Liked It: Becoming more familiar with Hoffman's work, her books of a certain period do tend to take on identifying characteristics. Practical Magic, Here on Earth, and this book all feature adult women facing caregivers and circumstances they haven't in years (usually since they were teenagers) and usually with a teenage girl (be it their daughter or niece) in tow. It's a kind of self actualization/past reconciliation that, while a touch formulaic, can still result in at least a mildly rewarding conclusion.
Much like Here on Earth, the novel is highly readable throughout and Hoffman's gift for lyrical setting never falters. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of her characters. A rich backstory through centuries of history and its direct effects on the "present", including the fact all women in the Sparrow family are blessed with near-psychic abilities that form after their thirteenth birthdays, is somewhat squandered by Hoffman's rather milquetoast resolutions for her characters, including handy heterosexual pair-offs for nearly everyone, including the recently teenaged. The pressing plot line action that requires the main character to revisit her childhood home and thus her past isn't resolved with any kind of solution, other than the overly pat manner that Hoffman resolves the strife of her main characters.
A running frustration with doing this project has been not how bad some books are, but the knowledge of how much better they could have been. While this book is fairly good, it had such clear potential to be excellent, and therein lies the disappointment.
Title: The Probable Future by Alice Hoffman
Details: Copyright 2003, Random House Publishing
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap):
"Alice Hoffman’s most magical novel to date-three generations of extraordinary women are driven to unite in crisis and discover the rewards of reconciliation and love.
Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people’s dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window on the future-a future that she might not want to see.
In The Probable Future this vivid and intriguing cast of characters confronts a haunting past-and a very current murder-against the evocative backdrop of small-town New England. By turns chilling and enchanting, The Probable Future chronicles the Sparrows’s legacy as young Stella struggles to cope with her disturbing clairvoyance. Her potential to ruin or redeem becomes unbearable when one of her premonitions puts her father in jail, wrongly accused of homicide. Yet this ordeal also leads Stella to the grandmother she was forbidden to meet and to a historic family home full of talismans from her ancestors.
Poignant, arresting, unsettling, The Probable Future showcases the lavish literary gifts that have made Alice Hoffman one of America’s most treasured writers."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Working my way through Alice Hoffman's catalog has yielded some pleasant surprises and some pleasant not-such-a-surprises.
How I Liked It: Becoming more familiar with Hoffman's work, her books of a certain period do tend to take on identifying characteristics. Practical Magic, Here on Earth, and this book all feature adult women facing caregivers and circumstances they haven't in years (usually since they were teenagers) and usually with a teenage girl (be it their daughter or niece) in tow. It's a kind of self actualization/past reconciliation that, while a touch formulaic, can still result in at least a mildly rewarding conclusion.
Much like Here on Earth, the novel is highly readable throughout and Hoffman's gift for lyrical setting never falters. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of her characters. A rich backstory through centuries of history and its direct effects on the "present", including the fact all women in the Sparrow family are blessed with near-psychic abilities that form after their thirteenth birthdays, is somewhat squandered by Hoffman's rather milquetoast resolutions for her characters, including handy heterosexual pair-offs for nearly everyone, including the recently teenaged. The pressing plot line action that requires the main character to revisit her childhood home and thus her past isn't resolved with any kind of solution, other than the overly pat manner that Hoffman resolves the strife of her main characters.
A running frustration with doing this project has been not how bad some books are, but the knowledge of how much better they could have been. While this book is fairly good, it had such clear potential to be excellent, and therein lies the disappointment.