But one day March shakes off Hollis’ controlling aggression and there is a happy ending. Upon her arrival, March encounters the fixation of her youth: a scoundrel named Hollis (the modern day Heathcliff) March becomes temporarily and very dangerously seduced by Hollis’s obsessive and brutal love. Hoffman’s tale of obsessive love begins when March Murray returns to her Massachusetts hometown with her teenage daughter to pay her last respects to her housekeeper (who had served as March’s mother when March’s mother had passed in her infancy). After reading the first few pages of Here on Earth, I thought I was reading Wuthering Heights set in the modern day of a small town in Massachusetts. There is so much left unknown, the ambiguity at the end, is how Hoffman has commented on Emily Brontë’s enduring novel. However, it is the wisdom Hoffman’s characters reveal to the reader, on the sorrows of loss and the regeneration of love, that also have me returning to a new Hoffman story.įor those who know Alice Hoffman, it is a well-known fact that one of Hoffman’s very favorite books is Wuthering Heights. And of course there are those subtle magical enchantments throughout some of Hoffman’s books that makes for delightful reading.
It is a constant in my life: I either put in a hold request at my local library or, if I know that Alice Hoffman will be coming to town at a bookstore near me, I buy the book and look forward to her autographing the title page.Īlso, I am assured that Hoffman will always bring a tear to the eye somewhere in the book-not just at the end. bringing a recently deceased and accidentally killed bad boyfriend back to life, one of the challenges in Practical Magic). As Hoffman develops her stories, the reader is attracted to the distinctive plots with her very flawed characters that compels the reader to turn the page and finish the story. Beginning in 1990 when I read Seventh Heaven, and for every year since, I anticipate the annual release of a new Alice Hoffman novel as I do birthdays and holidays. An Alice Hoffman novel employs ordinary people using extraordinary strategies when confronted with some of life’s challenges (e.g.
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