They’re reminiscent of the novellas Hoffman has taken to writing for teens - Aquamarine, Indigo, Green Angel - but these tales of transformation are more complex. It focuses on a friendship, adding new information in each chapter, which creates an atmosphere of curiosity. She is also able to encourage acceptance of others who are not like yourself. The stories in Blackbird House read like fables, more magical realism. Hoffman writes wonderful tales containing both nonfiction and fiction elements. Local Girls featured a goodly dose of Hoffman’s characteristic suburban surrealism, with fairy tales informing the fiction. The bird, which “could have easily been mistaken for a wisp of a cloud,” reappears in the succeeding stories, which move through the years as one generation after another calls Blackbird House home. The blackbird kept as a pet by his young son returns from the ill-fated voyage to tap at the door, but its feathers are all white. ESSENTIELEMAISON MARGIELAMARA HOFFMANMARCHESA NOTTEMARFA STANCEMARIE. This time, the unifying motif is a house on Cape Cod, built in Colonial times by a fisherman who drowns at sea. PERRYALEXACHUNGALEXANDER WANGALEXANDRE VAUTHIERALICE + OLIVIAALIX NYCALIX. Such footwear, Hoffman tells us in one of the linked stories in Blackbird House, is “always the mark of a witch.”įor sure, Hoffman is a witch when it comes to words, casting a spell with her luminous prose and flourishes of the fantastic in such novels as Seventh Heaven, Practical Magic and last year’s The Probable Future.īlackbird House also enchants, but it’s more akin to Hoffman’s 1999 Local Girls, in which the stories were all of one contemporary family.

If you should ever meet writer Alice Hoffman, see if she’s wearing red shoes. Indigo When her mother dies and her father remarries, Martha is so unhappy living in the dried-up town of Oak Grove, that she convinces two unusual.

Indigo by Alice Hoffman