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Search - Blackbird House
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Blackbird House Author: |
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Book Information
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Other Versions of this Book: Hardcover, Hardcover
Book Description:
With “incantatory prose” that “sweeps over the reader like a dream,” (Philadelphia Inquirer), Hoffman follows her celebrated bestseller The Probable Future, with an evocative work that traces the lives of the various occupants of an old Massachusetts house over a span of two hundred years.
In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the characters we meet: Violet, a brilliant girl who is in love with books and with a man destined to betray her; Lysander Wynn, attacked by a halibut as big as a horse, certain that his life is ruined until a boarder wearing red boots
arrives to change everything; Maya Cooper, who does not understand the true meaning of the love between her mother and father until it is nearly too late. From the time of the British occupation of Massachusetts to our own modern world, family after family's lives are inexorably changed, not only by the people they love but by the lives they lead inside Blackbird House.
These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one lasting element in our lives. The past both dissipates and remains contained inside the rooms of Blackbird House, where there are terrible secrets, inspired beauty, and, above all else, a spirit of coming home.
From the writer Time has said tells "truths powerful enough to break a reader's heart” comes a glorious travelogue through time and fate, through loss and love and survival. Welcome to Blackbird House.
In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the characters we meet: Violet, a brilliant girl who is in love with books and with a man destined to betray her; Lysander Wynn, attacked by a halibut as big as a horse, certain that his life is ruined until a boarder wearing red boots
arrives to change everything; Maya Cooper, who does not understand the true meaning of the love between her mother and father until it is nearly too late. From the time of the British occupation of Massachusetts to our own modern world, family after family's lives are inexorably changed, not only by the people they love but by the lives they lead inside Blackbird House.
These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one lasting element in our lives. The past both dissipates and remains contained inside the rooms of Blackbird House, where there are terrible secrets, inspired beauty, and, above all else, a spirit of coming home.
From the writer Time has said tells "truths powerful enough to break a reader's heart” comes a glorious travelogue through time and fate, through loss and love and survival. Welcome to Blackbird House.
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Top Member Book Reviews
Leigh P. (
8 member(s) found this review helpful.
Although certainly not her best work, this is Hoffman's typically lyric prose, brimming with metaphor and similie. The stories are engaging enough to hold your interest throughout, but a few I wish she'd written more about, as I'd become a bit more intrigued with the characters than I'd expected to be.
Taryn C. (
2 member(s) found this review helpful.
I love Alice Hoffman and this book didn't dissapoint. It is basically a group of short stories that take place in a 200 yr period in the same cottage in New England. Some of the stories are connected in some way, some are completely different. The book is a quick read but thought provoking. I highly recommend this book especially if you are a Hoffman fan.
2 member(s) found this review helpful.
Beautifully, lyrically written, as are all of her books. Each powerful "story" focuses on the inhabitants of a particular house isolated out on Cape Cod through the centuries of its existence. Definitely recommended reading for Hoffman fans!
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
The stories in this book were interesting but a little confusing, because it is almost a series of short stories, except that some of the people were related and the house was always involved. I kept going back and trying to figure out how people related to each other. It was a good read.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
I didn't really see the point to the collection of stories. I thought that they would all have something in common in the end, but no such luck. Each story seemed more depressing than the first. The tragedies that occurred in the blackbird house were very sad and made me feel sympathetic toward the characters. I don't believe that this was her best book.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
Hoffman's Blackbird House is a different one. I couldn't follow along very well and for that reason I ended up getting lost. Maybe because the back of the book states that the house stays in the family and I'm trying to figure out who's who and what era I'm reading now. It was rough.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
As usual, Alice Hoffman spins a lovely tale. This is a series of vignettes that take place across the centuries, centering around a home that seems destined for sadness by its inhabitants.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
Wonderful book! Loved the ending.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
Told in short story format, this novel weaves a tale of the many lives that pass through one house. Some lives are tragic, others inspirational, all touching.
Read All Book Reviews of "Blackbird House"
Please Rate these Book Reviews
M.C. W. (I enjoyed this book, which focuses on the lives of different people (mostly women) who lived in one New England house over a hundred years or so.
Reading this book, it's a guarantee that there will be passages that stop your breath.
excellent novel about a small farm and its relationship to many people
Pamela B. (About the story line: 12 lush and lilting interconnected stories, all taking place in the same Cape Cod farmhouse over the course of generations. Built during British colonial days by a man who dies tragically on a final fishing trip, Blackbird House is home, in the following generation, to a man who lost his leg to a giant halibut. In the late 19th century, Blackbird inhabitant Violet Cross has a brief affair with a Harvard scholar who inevitably betrays her; in the story that follows, she pushes her son, Lion West, to Harvard in 1908, which in turn launches him to life—and early death—in England. Lion's orphaned son, Lion West Jr., serves in World War II and meets a German-Jewish woman spirited enough to stand up to his possessive grandmother Violet. Hoffman's symbols are lovingly presented and polished: the 10-year-old boy who drowned with his father in the first story sets free a pet blackbird, who returns, now all white, to live with the boy's mother; in the last two stories, a 10-year-old boy blames a white crow for his mischief, and, a generation later, that boy's grown-up sister meets a 10-year-old boy who makes her reconsider selling Blackbird House. Fire, water, milk, pears, halibut—these, too, play important symbolic and sometimes almost magical roles. This may not be the subtlest of literary devices, but Hoffman's lyrical prose weaves an undeniable spell.
An interesting story which begins with the building of a house and details all of the lives and events that have passed through it's doors over the course of two centuries.
R B. (A very quick read, well-written book of intermingled short stories.
Really great linked series of stories about the inhabitants of a New England house
I am a fan of Alice Hoffman. This book was a collection of short stories all set around one particular house in the northeast.
Read All Book Reviews of "Blackbird House"
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