Alice Hoffman's prose is nearly gorgeous enough to console us for the tragedies The Story Sisters. It is a book about demons and family bonds; it is very much a work about sisterhood. Jealousy figures in, as do loyalty, protection, friendship, and shifting alliances. The novel begins with the three sisters as young girls, troubling and fascinating daughters to their loving divorcée mother, Annie. We meet them at the Plaza Hotel, dressed in blues that both set them apart and link them: "Teal and azure and sapphire. They liked to wear similar clothes and confuse people as to who was who." Elv, the eldest, is "the most beautiful"; Meg is "a great reader" and Claire, the youngest, is "diligent, kindhearted, never one to shirk chores." When they speak a private language to each other -- "lovely to hear, musical" -- most people are "charmed." But the charm cannot protect the girls themselves -- if anything their virtues seem to call down disaster.
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The novel follows this family -- whose punning surname really is "Story" -- through the tumultuous course of their lives, and takes place in nearly magical realms: seaside Long Island, New York City, Paris. If there is grief enough to spare, blow after blow of unbearable loss, moments of grace also abound, and Hoffman keeps pulling characters out of her sleeve till the final pages of book -- a sure sign of a master of fiction. (Doestoevsky always has one 11th-hour heroine or villain in his toolbox; so, too, does Dickens.) Even the most minor characters leave an indelible impression, like these two ominous counselors at a private school for wayward youth: "They seemed like prizefighters or bouncers in a nightclub. They wore black rain jackets and work boots. They were standing in the rain, waiting. If Annie could have felt anything, she might have been flooded with second thoughts. She might have made Alan turn the car around. But she was paralyzed."
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Hoffman brilliantly delineates the face of bereavement in the aftermath of a family disaster: mother and sister "stayed home all winter. They didn't shovel the snow on the walkway….They wandered into the kitchen and grabbed a bite of cheese or a cracker. They didn't trouble to use dishes anymore, only ate standing up, crouched over the sink or using paper napkins. They reminded Natalia of the dogs one sometimes saw in certain neighborhoods of Paris, wild and uncared for, dangerous to the touch." Hoffman's spare, terse method of constructing sentences adds to the haunting quality of the book and underscores its poetry. ("She wasn't the least bit spooked when the leaves on the trees rattled, always a sign of rain. The rain in Paris was beautiful, anyway, cold and clean and green.")
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Elv, the ravaged, angry heroine of the book, is especially memorable, both in her disintegration and in her efforts to redeem herself. Her name suggests her connection to a magical, alternative world, and her personality seems even to her mother a thorny mystery: "Her oldest girl sat up in the hawthorn tree late at night; she said she was looking at stars, but she was there even on cloudy nights, her black hair even blacker against the sky. Annie was certain that people who said daughters were easy had never had girls of their own." Elv's difficulties evolve from childhood eccentricity to self-mutilation to drug addiction. Even as a young girl she is wary, for good reason. Her exceptional beauty proves both a blessing and a curse.
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Elv put her sweater on, even though the room was quite warm. The waiter
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had been skulking around, trying to get close to her, breathing on her hair,
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looking at her as if he knew something.
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"Did you want something?" Mary Fox asked him.
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"Don't talk to him," Elv said.
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The sisters escape from the brutality of the real world around them to a made-up world they call Arnelle, with its own language, characters, and customs.
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Arnelle was everything the human world was not. Speech was
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unnecessary. Treachery was out of the question. It was a world where
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no one could take you by surprise or tell you a mouthful of lies. You could
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see someone's heart through his chest and know if he was a goblin, a mortal,
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or a true hero. You could divine a word's essence by a halo of color -- red
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was false, white was true, yellow was the foulest of lies. There were no
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ropes to tie you, no stale bread, no one to shut and lock the door.
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True heroes are rare in The Story Sisters, out-and-out villains even rarer, but not a single character fails to come to life under Hoffman's capable hand. As with any good story, one encounters birth and death, surprise twists of fate. Lovable characters sometimes come to terrible ends, and terrible characters turn themselves toward good. The justice one encounters in this world is more like the justice of the Grimm Brothers than the justice of a contemporary court of law. Speech and speechlessness, love and lovelessness do battle, as do primal forces of good and of evil. The book does flounder at times in the second half, pulled down by the weight of its own cumulative disasters. One or two plot twists ring false. But ultimately, Hoffman earns all of her dark moments.
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Like sisters in a fairy tale, these three have their impossible tasks to accomplish: "one to find love, one to find peace, one to find herself." If one can bear the darkness of the journey, Alice Hoffman offers a remarkable new telling of an old, enduring story. -- Liz Rosenberg
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Liz Rosenberg is the author of the novel Home Repair, published in May 2009 by HarperAvon, and of two recent books of poems, Demon Love (Mammoth Books) and The Lily Poems (Bright Hills). A book columnist for The Boston Globe, she also teaches English and Creative Writing at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Wendy Smith
excessive and over-determined but ultimately so moving that it overwhelms these faults…a brilliantly detailed delineation of ever-shifting power relations among siblings and a beautiful portrait of love's redemptive power
The Washington Post
Chelsea Cain
Hoffman has a child's dreamy eye, in the best possible sense. To her, the stuff grown-ups don't see anymore looms huge and importantinsects banging on windowpanes, thunderstorms, a chestnut tree with a door to the "otherworld." She invents a realm where that sense of the fictive doesn't go away, where imagination and reality bleed together…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.
The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Lyrical but atypically monotonous, bestseller Hoffman's (The Third Angel) latest follows the dark family saga of Elv, Megan and Claire Story, sisters plagued by uncommon sadness. As a child, Elv spun fairy tales of a magical world for her sisters, but a period of savage sexual abuse-information about which slowly leaks out-sends her spiraling into years of drug addiction and painful self-abuse. Elv's story is unrelentingly grim, and without Hoffman's characteristic magic realism, its simple downward spiral becomes exhausting. Tragedy after tragedy befalls the family-Elv's commitment to a juvenile rehab facility, a deadly accident, a fatal illness and betrayal after betrayal. When the last third of the book turns to focus on Claire, who has been so damaged by the family crises that she refuses to speak, the slight glimmers of hope and goodness are too little, too late. Hoffman's prose is as lovely as ever: the imagined and real worlds of the Story sisters are rich and clear, but Elv's troubles and the Story family's nonstop catastrophes are wearying. (June)
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Booklist
The always dazzling Hoffman has outdone herself . . . .Her alluring characters are soulful, their suffering mythic, and though the sorrows are many and the body count high, this is an entrancing and romantic drama shot through with radiant beauty and belief in human resilience and transformation. Starred Review\
New York Times Book Review
Hoffman's characters are always moving back and forth, challenging our perceptions, daring us to judge them. Her sentences tremble with allegory. . . . 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. (Bookish sisters beware).\
Library Journal
Once upon a time on Long Island, there were three Story sisters: Elv, Meg, and Claire. Aged 12 to 15, they were all beautiful and well behaved, with long, dark hair and pale eyes. They lived in magical harmony, speaking a private, shared language. Their parents were divorced, and the sisters visited their grandparents in Paris every spring. But their mother, Annie, feels increasingly left out of her daughters' lives. Indeed, darkness is soon to fall. Elv's belief in a secret underworld spins out of control, and she begins using drugs and stealing. Sent away to reform school, she falls in love with a man who is a heroin addict. There are betrayals and accidents, Annie falls ill, and the Story family disintegrates before our eyes. This is one of Hoffman's darkest novels yet, and some of Hoffman's readers may find it too dark. But name recognition advises purchase of multiple copies for libraries, and hope for the family's healing keeps readers, heartbroken yet spellbound, turning the pages. [See Prepub Alert, LJ2/1/09.]
Keddy Ann Outlaw\
Kirkus Reviews
An act of child abuse has lasting consequences in Hoffman's painfully moving novel (The Third Angel, 2008, etc.). The summer Claire Story was 8 and her sister Elv was 11, a man tried to abduct Claire in his car; Elv jumped in, told Claire to jump out, and it was hours before she returned. They never told their mother Annie or middle sister Meg-their father walked out that same summer-and neither girl was ever the same. As the main narrative opens, when Elv is 15, she's becoming an out-of-control adolescent increasingly at odds with careful, rule-following Meg. Racked with guilt over the unknown horrors her sister endured in her place, Claire tries to be loyal, but as Elv's drug use and promiscuity escalate, she backs away. The desperate Annie finally takes Elv to a rehab facility, enlisting the reluctant support of her selfish ex-husband, who insists it's all her fault. At the facility, Elv meets Lorry, a thief and addict who introduces her to heroin, but who also really loves her. The chronology speeds up after Elv comes home and a dreadful accident seals her alienation from her family. Hoffman paints wrenching scenes of tentative efforts at reconciliation that just barely fail, as Elv becomes pregnant and cleans up, but loses Lorry to his "fatal flaw." A kindly detective brings late-life happiness to Annie and metes out delayed justice to Elv's abuser, but the disasters keep coming. Two sisters grow into adulthood, dreadfully damaged by the losses they've endured and their punishing self-blame for the mistakes they made. Hoffman's habitual allusions to mysterious supernatural forces are very jarring in this context, as is the endless interpolation of memories from the terribleabduction; she could have trusted her readers to get the point with out constant prodding. A radiant denouement shows love redeeming the surviving sisters, and there are beautiful moments throughout, but they don't entirely compensate for Hoffman's excesses of plot and tone. A near-miss from this uneven but always compelling writer. 8-city author tour (cities upon request)\
From the Publisher
Hoffman’s characters are always moving back and forth, challenging our perceptions, daring us to judge them. Her sentences tremble with allegory. . . . 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. (Bookish sisters beware).”
– New York Times Book Review
“Hoffman is celebrated for her ability to conjure plausible alternative realities, to sprinkle her landscapes with witches and other mythical creatures, while keeping her stories closely tethered to familiar terrain. There’s a mysticism that swirls about her works but, like a late-morning fog, it eventually burns off to reveal a physical and emotional topography that most all of us can recognize.”
– Chicago Tribune
"This bewitching novel explores the bonds of sisterhood like a haunting modern fairy tale."
– Glamour
“Any new book by Hoffman is an occasion to rejoice, as is the case with The Story Sisters.”
– Sacramento Bee
“The sisters’ struggle to grow and thrive in the real world will keep you riveted to the pages of this heartbreaking novel about the powers and limits of love.”
– Redbook
"When it comes to blending magic and the mundane routines of life, there's no finer writer than Alice Hoffman but even she has outdone herself with her latest novel. The Story Sisters hearkens back to the classic fairy tale, where one must suffer fear and loss before stumbling upon a happy ending. Hoffman reminds us with every sentence that words have the power to transport us to alternate worlds, to heal a broken heart, and to tie us irrevocably to the people we love."
– Jodi Picoult, author of Handle With Care
“The always dazzling Hoffman has outdone herself in this bewitching weave of psychologically astute fantasy and shattering realism….this is an entrancing and romantic drama shot through with radiant beauty and belief in human resilience and transformation.”
– Booklist (starred review)
“Painfully moving….there are beautiful moments throughout.”
– Kirkus Reviews
“Keeps readers heartbroken yet spellbound, turning the pages.”
– Library Journal