Seventh Heaven (original 1990; edition 2003)

Set in a 1950's Stepford community of apple pie baking stay at home moms and fathers who are the kings of their castles a divorcee with two young boys buys a falling down house and changes the community. The first thing she does when they move in is to bake a batch of cookies. Can you imagine that being your first step on moving in to a new house, before you unpack anything else? Nora's quite the renegade. There's a bit of magic, a little sexuality, confused children, confused parents, and a lot of soul searching. Just the thing to read when you think life is too much. ( )

Seventh Heaven is Alice Hoffman’s 9th stand-alone novel and tells the story of when attractive divorcee Nora Silk came to live in Hemlock Street, Long Island with 8 year-old Billy and baby James. Set in the late ‘50s, it captures the dispiriting feeling of suburbia. As a divorced woman, Nora found her presence posed a threat and prevented her from being part of the community. The story is told from several different characters’ perspectives. Hoffman gives us beautiful prose and evocative descriptions that bring the reader right into the moment, even if it is occasionally not such a pleasant one. When Hoffman writes, the reader feels all the anxiety, fear, frustration, joy, sorrow and wonder that her characters feel. I really enjoyed the incongruity of a brilliant butterfly like Nora selling Tupperware to the oppressed moths of suburbia. I loved this novel. ( )

Alice Hoffman's books are always magical. This one is more rooted in realism than most. Hoffman's ability to convey the emotions we all have but are often unwilling to admit to, is striking and mesmerizing. ( )

This book uses its setting and characters very effectively to show how the looks of the American dream can be deceiving. When the main character moves to 1960s suburban American, her very presence makes life less perfect and yet somehow more real for the other people who live there. Like most Hoffman, this includes elements of magical realism, including a ghost who haunts not her killer, but his brother, and a mother who uses old spells to keep her child save at school.

Another good read. ( )

Hoffman always writes of the ghosts that haunt people's lives. This book is no exception. However, the more interesting aspect of this book is how well Hoffman has drawn a character that so accurately illustrates the Aphrodite Goddess-type written about by Jane Shiboda Bolen in her book, The Goddess in Every Woman. Aphrodite archetypes are women who, without any conscious knowledge, set off reactions in others for which the Aphrodite-type is often cursed. Aphrodite is called by Shiboda-Bolen the "Alchemical Goddess", the woman who has an inherent sexual charge to her nature, who spurs the unspoken desires in men and the often unacknowledged fears or desires in other women.

The setting of this book is the early-1950s in America, where the first housing subdivisions are being built. Conformity is the Rule of the Day, especially the demand for female conformity. In this era, women were tightly controlled and their sexuality was deeply feared. The housing subdivision was a metaphor for the sameness, the standardization of behavior, of looks, of hopes and dreams that were held as the American Ideal of the day.

Into this world of houses that all look the same and people who never go outside the boldly delineated lines of social expectation that were drawn for them moves Rita, a divorcee with two young children at a time when divorce was still considered scandalous.

Rita sets off a chain of reactions among the residents of the subdivision that transforms each of them. ( )