Blackbird House: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Now, I might be a bit prejudiced because I live with 15 parrots and am a wild-bird watcher, but I find this book wonderful. Reading Alice Hoffman's writing is like gazing through a sun-catcher. As the light moves through the colors, it catches your eye and touches your heart in unexpected ways. Ever since her book PRACTICAL MAGIC, Hoffman has lead this reader into a mystical and magical realm where all things are possible, and although truly sad things happen a heartlift is felt at the end if the tale. Hoffman has a deft touch, neither clobbering the reader with too much explanation, nor failing to inform. What happens to the bird? He isn't always black. Do the lovers get together, why yes, you discover a few pages later when their grandchildren tell their story. Each of the stories in this little book stands alone, yet all are woven into a fabric which includes the threads of singular lives who within the space of a few pages you come to care about. I have read whole novels and not cared for the protagonist or any of the other characters. How can an author be called anything but magical when she can make you care for many people individually wihtin a few paragraphs?

Because I think I have. If you're looking for a book with a well-defined plot and clear-cut characters, this isn't it. BLACKBIRD HOUSE has no sharp edges. Rather, it's about blurred boundaries between water and land, organs and skin, love and hate, life and death, conscious and subconscious. The inner and the outer. Seeming contradictions that come to make perfect sense. It's about different ways people can be lost (`at sea'), find home (even if they've been there all along), shape their lives or let circumstance take over, love, die, be wounded, heal. Alice Hoffman skillfully maneuvers a thin line, finding a balance between the limited part of existence about which our senses inform us, and what lies beyond ordinary senses. She's created a place where everything has meaning, though that's not necessarily a comforting thing; it's simply what is. Although it has what may seem to be fantastical touches, BH is not a fantasy, nor is it a New Age-y, feel-good read. It's about aspects of reality some shrug off as imagination, a trick of light or last night's bad clams. If you give BLACKBIRD HOUSE half a chance, you'll find its truth and beauty -- the type of truth and beauty that are as likely to prick as they are to placate. Threads of metaphor abound: red and red-related colors, black, fish, birds, snow, cold, feet, cows, milk. And of course the blackbird (which isn't, really).

I find Alice Hoffman to be completely unique because her world is a multi-layered, intertwined place where the fish in the pond, the birds and stars in the sky, the leaves on the trees and the people that inhabit the spaces between them make up a landscape that I cannot compare to anything else I have read. This book takes her sensibility and uses it in a new way. Writing teachers always try to get you to tie up loose ends which I think is not always real. In this book, Alice Hoffman ties up some loose ends and leaves others hanging in an extremely intriguing way. I like this quality because it is more true to life. The book tells the stories of the many who have lived in one house over a period of close to 200 years. Some of the characters of Blackbird House intersect and conclude. Others, as in real life, are left open ended. Each character is original and intriguing. The writing is evocative, rich and unique to the gifts of one of the few modern writers that has carved out a place where no one else has gone. Blackbird House is a quick, satisfying, rich read. Don't miss it.

On Cape Cod sits a white house surrounded by Massachusetts vegetation and farm land. It could be any New England home, but if you look closely this home is the setting for Alice Hoffman's newest book, Blackbird House.As a long time reader of Alice Hoffman's books, I looked forward to her latest title with much anticipation. And now that I've read this book, I found it to be another one of Alice Hoffman's best books. Blackbird House is a series of interconnected short stories. While they can surely be read one at a time, if they are read together loosely as a novel they will provide most readers with another of Ms. Hoffman's books steeped in wonderful characterizations and magic realism. Every sense is awakened as one digests her flowing words. We feel her characters joys and losses, revel in her descriptions of nature and animals and hope for a good outcome for her characters lives as they unfold before our eyes. With the house as a backdrop and one of her most endearing characters, Ms. Hoffman provides her readers with pages filled with unusual people, magical places and events which challenge the emotions of the human heart. So entranced was I by some of the passages and stories, I was forced to close the book for a few minutes and take deep breaths before I could go on to read more.. As we read we come to learn of the history of Blackbird House from over 200 years ago. We first meet the builder of the house John Hadley, a fisherman during Revolutionary times who builds the house as a monument to the endearing love he has for his wife. When he goes off to sea with his two young sons, a blackbird, the youngest son's pet accompanies them and returns to the house now totally white after disaster strikes. This blackbird and its other white descendants seem to hover around the house at other times during the tales as if a witness to everything which happens both to the hoseu and the people who occupy it. In another story we meet Lysander who lost his leg to a giant halibut but finds love and courage with a woman thought to be the witch of Truro. In turn we read story after story of succeeding families who inhabit the house. Violet, who is betrayed by her lover, but then learns to love the local boy and gives birth to seven children eventually traveling to England to bring her orphaned grandson home. And then we meet this grandson all grown home who meets a German Jewish survivor in Germany during WWII and bring her home to meet Violet. How these two very different women come to terms with loving the same man provides readers with a wonderful story of love and jealousy. Finally we meet Emma, a 30 year old who rather lost after her divorce returns to her family's vacation home which she inherits from her parents. But of all of the stories I think it was the story India which rally captivated me the most as a young woman learns about the love her parents had for one another in a rather unusual household during the 60's. At on

Alice Hoffman is a conjurer of prose. She understands human frailty, vulnerability, self-conscious loathing of birth abnormalities, the need for feeling love, and other acts of living. She writes about New England as well as anyone writing today - her pages are filled with visual stimuli that hang so closely to the retina that though they are often repeated (the color red as embodied by pears, berries, blood, leather, etc.), each repetition serves only to magnify the original richness of impulse. BLACKBIRD HOUSE spans 200 odd years of life on Cape Cod, and while many are calling the chapters 'essays' or 'short stories', they seem more like a cohesive novel about the land and the endurance of the sea and time than anything so disjointed as individual stories. Each of the chapters is connected and it is this connection of odd characters and their progeny that propels the reader nonstop from the early days of the colonies to the present. Hoffman creates dark characters: pain, bruise, emotional devastation and fate are woven like a continuing tapestry, passed from generation to generation. The seeds of all the characters, no matter from where they may be speaking (from the Cape, Boston, London, etc) all are firmly planted in the sweet peas, nettles and bramble that surround the sturdy house that makes the title. Here are witching, blackbirds that become white like ghosts, the ocean, and every type of family dysfunctional unit imaginable. BLACKBIRD HOUSE is not unlike the magical realism of our Latin American writers, but with a thoroughly American twist that makes it even more delicious! An excellent book, this!