A Fistful of Sky

The narrator of A Fistful of Sky is Gypsum, the middle LaZelle sibling and the only one who didn't "transition" and come into her magical powers as a teenager. At nearly 21, she's resigned to her normal, mundane life - living at home, and working as an English tutor and taking classes at City College. Her late transition is a shock, especially as Gyp is gifted with an unusual "unkind" power.

As Gyp learns about and explores her new power, she is forced to re-evaluate who she is and her relationships with her family. (It also challenges her family to do the same.) Much of the story takes place at home and revolves around Gyp's interactions with her family.
I'd seen the LaZelles as a "dysfunctional magical family" so I was surprised by how show more much I liked Gyp and her siblings (three of whom also still live at home). Her siblings have manipulated her in an unthinking, taking-her-for-granted kind of way, and have also made some "scary mistakes" but they care and they're there for her when she needs them.
It is her relationship with her mother that is the most dysfunctional - Mama LaZelle has really struggled to accept that Gyp is non-magical and overweight. In this respect, Mama is scary.

A Fistful of Sky is both familiar and unusual, occasionally uncomfortable and eerie, and evocative. It focuses on the domestic and the personal - family dynamics, baking, body-image, trying to work out who you are and what to do with your life - and shows that these things are not insignificant, they're important and can be huge. Especially magical baking.
It's a coming-of-age novel and the sort of borderline YA novel I want to read more of - with a protagonist who has finished high school, caught between adolescence and adulthood. I really like how Gyp's two friends are so accepting of her, and I loved the sibling relationships.

Also, A Fistful of Sky is a gorgeous title. show less

After putting this down, I was really conflicted over whether I really liked the book or not. On the one hand, as I was reading it, I got swept up in the story, had trouble putting it down, and really wanted to keep reading. But, once I finished the book, I was left unsatisfied and a bit disappointed. There were a number of things that were flawed:

The characterizations were very weak and vague. While the family antics amused me (Oh boy, talk about dysfunctional!), none of the characters, not even the narrator was fleshed out enough for me to feel an emotional attachment. Of the siblings, if Hoffman hadn't used their names I probably wouldn't have been able to tell them apart. Nor did we fully get to meet anyone outside the family. show more Claire and July were supposedly large and important parts of Gyp's life, but they were barely there and personality-less. We didn't even learn much about Ian other than he was a nice guy.

The rushed ending. Gyp figured out how to control her magic, and book ended. The end. What? Wait. It's only been a week, if that! Really needed more for me to feel real resolution.

Magic was too casually acceptance by those outside the family. After Gyp outs herself with Ian, and later with Claire, neither of them freaked out, asked a billion questions, or did anything but accept that she can curse things. Completely unrealistic, even with both's experiences with the occult, given that neither of them were particularly gifted themselves or had knowingly seen real magic before.

But what really bothered me throughout the book and made me not like it was the implication that if you had power, you could do whatever you wanted to anyone who had less power or no power -- with little or no consequence. The old adage that power corrupts is shown throughout the book. The LaZelles manipulated those around them, their surroundings, and even themselves however they saw fit, and did not question their right. As the normal sibling, Gyp was subjected to magical manipulation of her thoughts, feelings, wants, desires, actions, and even her own shape -- all without a second thought by the rest of her family. It was considered their right to spell her... because they could. Why else would her (horrible, horrible) mother never step in to police her children's use of power? Or try and protect Gyp from being made into a guinea pig? And her mother was the worst of the lot, creating compulsions for her children to never leave home, spelling her daughter so she would exercise and diet relentlessly, structuring their life to fit her idea of how it should be. She was abusive without ever having to lift a hand towards her children.

And when Gyp comes into her own power, she proves herself above this unthinkingly cruel way of being. She doesn't want to hurt people and tries desperately to try and harness her power benignly. So what does being this goodhearted persona get her? The role of walking doormat. She accommodates everyone automatically. She was so nice and sweet, she put up with everyone spelling her, manipulating her, and using her. And she STILL cheerfully cooks dinner half the week and spends an entire day making them cookies. But I have to wonder how much of that is her true personality and how much of that is having lived for two decades under the subtle control of her more powerful family members? She hated not being herself when she's cursed with Ultimate Fashion Sense - yet does she even know who she really is? She never stood up for herself; she let herself be talked into working on a day she had called in sick, she lets herself be pulled along by Altria, though she tries and controls the outcomes. THAT was the reason why I didn't connect with Gyp - I could never see myself acting so passively.

Though all the descriptions of food made me really want to make cookies and brownies. show less

I loved this book. It has a nicely whimsical story of a young woman learning about her magic in a magical family, but also shows some much deeper themes about family relationships. The two things are blended together very well, and the family relationship issues showed both the good things (being able to count on each other, the love) and the bad (domineering and controlling of each other). I really wish the next book would be about Gypsum and not about her sister...

edit: I almost forgot, one of the things I really like about this book is that the protagonist is not only not skinny, she is comfortable in her body and does not change it, even though she has the power to.

Although she makes no overt connection (that I noticed), the LaZelle family in 'A Fistful of Sky' is extremely similar to the magical family in her other novel, 'The Thread the Binds the Bones,' and I'd assume that Hoffman intends them to be cousins, of a sort.
However, I think that 'Fistful of Sky' is the more successful novel. It deals with the plight of Gyp, a young woman who, in addition to dealing with the issues of a loving yet controlling family and the 'normal' traumas of dating, self-image, and thinking about a career, has much more to worry about as well. As I mentioned, she comes from a magical family, and when she goes through 'transition' and gains her power, it turns out to be the rare power of curses. For Gyp, who is show more essentially a friendly, non-vindictive type who loves baking cookies and curling up with a good book, this is truly a curse. If she doesn't use her power, she will die. Her travails as she attempts, blunderingly, to cast her nasty spells where they'll do the least harm, are charming and amusing - but also insightful, as Hoffman deals subtly with the ways in which we tie ourselves to and interact with others, the dynamics of family, relationships and society... show less

One of my favourites books in the whole world. It's about a girl who lives in a family with magical powers, she grows up expecting to get them too but instead "The Change" never arrives for her and she is normal within people who aren't and at the same time is pretty different from other normal people... Only, after years of wishing for magic of her own, The Change comes, in a way, only it's way too late to be a normal Change...

AFoS was love at first sight for me, the overweight and bookish protagonist with an appreciation for good food who's the ugly duckling of a magical family and has to made to with being "normal", that's it, with something that is, for her with her upbringing, basically a disability (even if her father and other show more people outside the family are also that way it does not feel that way to them, who never expected to go through transition and get a gift). This is my favourite novel ever, there's fanfic I love more but literature wise? I don't think anything can compete, not necessarily because it's better than "The Time Traveller's Wife" or "Hallucinating Foucault" but because it fits *me*. show less

This was the most engrossing creepy wish fulfillment fantasy I've read in a while. Gypsum is the one untalented sibling in a family of people capable of magic. There's no magical boarding school and kids do to each other the nasty things that kids do to each other, but even more so. It's the story of her finding her power and trying to find herself, the usual YA stuff, but I found it hard to put down and gorged on it in only a few days.

The LaZelles are your typical Southern California family, except for the fact that all, except the father, are witches. At approximately age 16, each of the five children are supposed to go through Transition. It’s characterized by being really sick for a few days; when it’s over, the person’s magical powers, whatever they may be, are born. For whatever reason, Gypsum, the middle child, doesn’t go through Transition. Perhaps she is destined to be “normal,” like her father. When everyone else becomes an official witch or warlock, Gypsum usually ends up being the magical “guinea pig.”

One weekend, while everyone else is away, Gypsum gets really sick, not realizing it’s her very delayed Transition. Unfortunately, her power show more is the dark power of cursing. She has to curse or damn something every few hours, or the power will eat her up from inside. She curses a rock, and it turns into a box of magic chalk. Gypsum and her siblings draw on some cement stairs with the chalk, and the drawings come to life. An easy way to release some energy is to cause the trash in the trash cans to disappear. But, do it too often, and people will become suspicious.

Gypsum tries to filter her power through one of her brothers. The subject of making brownies comes up, and the two fill most of their back yard with very edible brownies. Later, they create an equal quantity of fresh-baked bread and muffins. One time, Gypsum turns her younger sister into an old woman. Another time, she causes the mouths of her two brothers to disappear. It’s a good thing her “human” curses come with built-in time limits. On a date with her boyfriend, Ian, Gypsum tries turning her curse power back on herself, to turn herself back to “normal,” and comes very close to killing herself.

This retelling of the Ugly Duckling story is humorous, heartfelt and very, very good. Hoffman’s writing comes very close to poetry. It works as an adult novel, and as a young adult novel, and it is well worth reading. show less