Book-It 'o14! Book #50
The Fifty Books Challenge, year five! ( 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013) This was a library request.
Title: Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman
Details: Copyright 1997, Penguin Putnam Inc
Synopsis (By Way of Front and Back Flaps):
"In her most ambitious novel to date, Alice Hoffman delivers a spellbinding tale of love and obsession.
The remarkable fiction of Alice Hoffman has the power to work magic, and as Newsweek says, "The real spell is the one cast by Hoffman's splendid writing." Author of the bestselling novels Seventh Heaven, Turtle Moon, and Practical Magic, Hoffman now creates her most glorious fictional world. The New Yorker has called Hoffman "a dreamy and mesmerizing storyteller," and never has she had a more seductive story to tell.
After nearly twenty years of living in California, March Murray, along with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, returns to the small Massachusetts town where she grew up to attend the funeral of Judith Dale, the beloved housekeeper who raised her. Thrust into the world of her past, March slowly realizes the complexity of the choices made by those around her, including Mrs. Dale, who knew more of love than March could have ever suspected; Alan, the brother whose tragic history has left him grief-stricken, with alcohol his only solace; and Hollis, the boy she loved, the man she can't seem to stay away from.
Here on Earth is the dramatic and lyrical accounting of the joys of love, as well as the destruction love can release. The riveting themes of Wuthering Heights resonate beneath the surface, and a dangerous question is raised: Can a love that consumes you survive? Or perhaps more important, can anyone survive a love that consumes?
Erotic, disturbing, and compelling, this is without a doubt Alice Hoffman's most unforgettable novel.
"
Why I Wanted to Read It: I'd been easing through Hoffman's oeuvre and I was really impressed with The Museum of Extraordinary Things. I'd somehow missed that this was on Oprah's fabled Booklist despite the fact I read my way through almost the entire list in my teens. This was apparently very well-received so it seemed natural to give it a try.
How I Liked It: The story is compelling, as is Hoffman's gift for setting, but the characters run too frequently into the light to barely sketched.
While far lesser talent Sarah Addison Allen gets comparisons to Hoffman's work (particularly Practical Magic) even in one of her lesser novels, Hoffman evokes a depth that Allen could only aspire. Perhaps it was the slogging through the three Allen books between The Museum of Ordinary Things and this book, but I did compare the two authors more than I expected.
While the characterization still falls woefully short in this book, a device as simple as turning the nostalgia of "lost loves" and the boy who survived a miserable upbringing into not a love story through the ages, but a severely stunted emotional addiction and an abusive man.
The book winds largely promising backstories for most of the characters, almost none of which come to any fruition with the plot. Secrets and revelations come to light, but nothing is really done with them.
Even the ending itself, action-packed as it may seem, is a cop-out on numerous levels to various emotional insurance we've placed in the novel: we don't get a proper ending for anyone, really.
Notable: While I grasp that Hoffman's writing is fanciful and mundane events of life are made more poetic, I'm fairly sure it's romanticizing domestic abuse when you refer to it as "being eaten up by love" or "being consumed by love."
The main character is involved with a dangerous physically and emotionally abusive man responsible for his ex-wife's death who has extended that physical and emotional abuse to her teenage daughter. It's not a love story, even a "dark" one, and while abuse victims might find themselves in this book and might find solace in the diligent tracking of how domestic abuse starts and spreads, it's painting a dangerous picture to portray it as any form of love, especially when there are character and stories that aren't abusive and are best covered by the "consuming love" angle.
Title: Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman
Details: Copyright 1997, Penguin Putnam Inc
Synopsis (By Way of Front and Back Flaps):
"In her most ambitious novel to date, Alice Hoffman delivers a spellbinding tale of love and obsession.
The remarkable fiction of Alice Hoffman has the power to work magic, and as Newsweek says, "The real spell is the one cast by Hoffman's splendid writing." Author of the bestselling novels Seventh Heaven, Turtle Moon, and Practical Magic, Hoffman now creates her most glorious fictional world. The New Yorker has called Hoffman "a dreamy and mesmerizing storyteller," and never has she had a more seductive story to tell.
After nearly twenty years of living in California, March Murray, along with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, returns to the small Massachusetts town where she grew up to attend the funeral of Judith Dale, the beloved housekeeper who raised her. Thrust into the world of her past, March slowly realizes the complexity of the choices made by those around her, including Mrs. Dale, who knew more of love than March could have ever suspected; Alan, the brother whose tragic history has left him grief-stricken, with alcohol his only solace; and Hollis, the boy she loved, the man she can't seem to stay away from.
Here on Earth is the dramatic and lyrical accounting of the joys of love, as well as the destruction love can release. The riveting themes of Wuthering Heights resonate beneath the surface, and a dangerous question is raised: Can a love that consumes you survive? Or perhaps more important, can anyone survive a love that consumes?
Erotic, disturbing, and compelling, this is without a doubt Alice Hoffman's most unforgettable novel.
"
Why I Wanted to Read It: I'd been easing through Hoffman's oeuvre and I was really impressed with The Museum of Extraordinary Things. I'd somehow missed that this was on Oprah's fabled Booklist despite the fact I read my way through almost the entire list in my teens. This was apparently very well-received so it seemed natural to give it a try.
How I Liked It: The story is compelling, as is Hoffman's gift for setting, but the characters run too frequently into the light to barely sketched.
While far lesser talent Sarah Addison Allen gets comparisons to Hoffman's work (particularly Practical Magic) even in one of her lesser novels, Hoffman evokes a depth that Allen could only aspire. Perhaps it was the slogging through the three Allen books between The Museum of Ordinary Things and this book, but I did compare the two authors more than I expected.
While the characterization still falls woefully short in this book, a device as simple as turning the nostalgia of "lost loves" and the boy who survived a miserable upbringing into not a love story through the ages, but a severely stunted emotional addiction and an abusive man.
The book winds largely promising backstories for most of the characters, almost none of which come to any fruition with the plot. Secrets and revelations come to light, but nothing is really done with them.
Even the ending itself, action-packed as it may seem, is a cop-out on numerous levels to various emotional insurance we've placed in the novel: we don't get a proper ending for anyone, really.
Notable: While I grasp that Hoffman's writing is fanciful and mundane events of life are made more poetic, I'm fairly sure it's romanticizing domestic abuse when you refer to it as "being eaten up by love" or "being consumed by love."
The main character is involved with a dangerous physically and emotionally abusive man responsible for his ex-wife's death who has extended that physical and emotional abuse to her teenage daughter. It's not a love story, even a "dark" one, and while abuse victims might find themselves in this book and might find solace in the diligent tracking of how domestic abuse starts and spreads, it's painting a dangerous picture to portray it as any form of love, especially when there are character and stories that aren't abusive and are best covered by the "consuming love" angle.