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Loading... The Story Sisters: A Novel (original 2009; edition 2010)by Alice Hoffman
Work detailsThe Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman (2009)
I made it 38 pages in, but I just couldn't keep going. I just wasn't interested in the lives of these sisters. They seemed a little too stuck-up...which sounds terrible since something tragic happened...however, I don't know what the mystery tragedy was, I only know the tragedy caused by the oldest sister's ramblings about starved horses (and that's enough for me). Written in the same vein as Practical Magic, but almost relentlessly depressing. It does end on an up note, however. This novel is dark. It evokes gut wrenching sadness that stays with you long after you put the book down. It's brilliant. The wonderfully deep characters I've come to love reading by Hoffman. While I hated that the treatment for Elv was so inadequate and so late, I completely understand the mother being too overwhelmed to notice what was going on earlier. The book did seem to peter out half way thru...events just chronicled rather than having her characters live them. There were memorable quotes that made me decide to keep the book anyway.
In Alice Hoffman’s new novel, three long-haired sisters are stolen from their “faerie” family by mortals, stripped of their magic and given a false name. I could be wrong about that. That could be just a story the eldest sister tells her siblings...The last act grows a bit histrionic and narrative strands are over-tangled, then too neatly tied up, but Hoffman’s writing is so lovely and her female characters so appealing that it almost doesn’t matter. In the end, “The Story Sisters,” for all its magic realism, is about a family navigating through motherhood, sisterhood, daughterhood. It’s “Little Women” on mushrooms. It's a rare year that doesn't bring a novel from Alice Hoffman, and those who follow this maddeningly uneven writer have learned to cast a wary eye on each new offering....The Story Sisters," actually, is In-Between Alice: excessive and over-determined but ultimately so moving that it overwhelms these faults.
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This isn't a bad book. If it were by another author I might've liked it better. But coming from Hoffman it's just so much less satisfying than much of her other work. (