logo
Wrong email address or username
Wrong email address or username
Incorrect verification code
Blackbird House: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) - Alice Hoffman
Blackbird House: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
by: (author)
3.85 135
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... show more
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.
show less
Format: paperback
ISBN: 9780345455932 (0345455932)
ASIN: 0345455932
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Pages no: 238
Edition language: English
Bookstores:
Community Reviews
FefferBooks
FefferBooks rated it
3.0 Blackbird House
There were parts of this book I absolutely delighted in, and others I just felt lukewarm about. I'm not generally much for short stories--I like my reading to have some thread of plot or continuity. Happily, Hoffman accomplishes exactly this with Blackbird House: each story moves forward a generatio...
willemite
willemite rated it
Places have much greater permanence than people. Land exists for eons (now don’t get picky about ocean fronts migrating and the Big Island expanding. You know what I mean) whereas people last mere generations, and often much less. On the surface at least, Blackbird House is a novel of place, in whi...
good english
good english rated it
Blackbird House is a collection of short stories set in the same place over a span of 200 years; the house in the title is the main common thread, but there are other elements that repeat throughout the book (some more successfully than others). That kind of thing is like delicious candy to me, so I...
CJ the Book Peddler
CJ the Book Peddler rated it
5.0
Best short story book I've read in a very long time. Had a good theme of the home but each story is different.
On shelves
Share this Book
Need help?