Blackbird House: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

With “incantatory prose” that “sweeps over the reader like a dream,” (Philadelphia Inquirer), Hoffman follows her celebrated bestseller The Probable Future, with an evocative work that traces the lives of the various occupants of an old Massachusetts house over a span of two hundred years.

In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the characters we meet: Violet, a brilliant girl who is in love with books and with a man destined to betray her; Lysander Wynn, attacked by a halibut as big as a horse, certain that his life is ruined until a boarder wearing red boots
arrives to change everything; Maya Cooper, who does not understand the true meaning of the love between her mother and father until it is nearly too late. From the time of the British occupation of Massachusetts to our own modern world, family after family’s lives are inexorably changed, not only by the people they love but by the lives they lead inside Blackbird House.

These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one lasting element in our lives. The past both dissipates and remains contained inside the rooms of Blackbird House, where there are terrible secrets, inspired beauty, and, above all else, a spirit of coming home.

From the writer Time has said tells "truths powerful enough to break a reader’s heart” comes a glorious travelogue through time and fate, through loss and love and survival. Welcome to Blackbird House.

Customer Reviews:

A House Like No Other!

By Nancy R. Katz "NancyK18" - August 9, 2004

On Cape Cod sits a white house surrounded by Massachusetts vegetation and farm land. It could be any New England home, but if you look closely this home is the setting for Alice Hoffman's newest book, Blackbird House.As a long time reader of Alice Hoffman's books, I looked forward to her latest title with much anticipation. And now that I've read this book, I found it to be another one of Alice Hoffman's best books.

Blackbird House is a series of interconnected short stories. While they can surely be read one at a time, if they are read together loosely as a novel they will provide most readers with another of Ms. Hoffman's books steeped in wonderful characterizations and magic realism. Every sense is awakened as one digests her flowing words. We feel her characters joys and losses, revel in her descriptions of nature and animals and hope for a good outcome for her characters lives as they unfold before our eyes. With the house as a backdrop and one of her most... read more

Can you fall in love with a story?

By Diana Poskrop - October 6, 2004

Because I think I have.

If you're looking for a book with a well-defined plot and clear-cut characters, this isn't it.

BLACKBIRD HOUSE has no sharp edges. Rather, it's about blurred boundaries between water and land, organs and skin, love and hate, life and death, conscious and subconscious. The inner and the outer. Seeming contradictions that come to make perfect sense.

It's about different ways people can be lost (`at sea'), find home (even if they've been there all along), shape their lives or let circumstance take over, love, die, be wounded, heal.

Alice Hoffman skillfully maneuvers a thin line, finding a balance between the limited part of existence about which our senses inform us, and what lies beyond ordinary senses. She's created a place where everything has meaning, though that's not necessarily a comforting thing; it's simply what is.

Although it has what may seem to be fantastical touches, BH is not a fantasy, nor... read more

For the Beauty of the Word

By Grady Harp - August 3, 2004

Alice Hoffman is a conjurer of prose. She understands human frailty, vulnerability, self-conscious loathing of birth abnormalities, the need for feeling love, and other acts of living. She writes about New England as well as anyone writing today - her pages are filled with visual stimuli that hang so closely to the retina that though they are often repeated (the color red as embodied by pears, berries, blood, leather, etc.), each repetition serves only to magnify the original richness of impulse. BLACKBIRD HOUSE spans 200 odd years of life on Cape Cod, and while many are calling the chapters 'essays' or 'short stories', they seem more like a cohesive novel about the land and the endurance of the sea and time than anything so disjointed as individual stories. Each of the chapters is connected and it is this connection of odd characters and their progeny that propels the reader nonstop from the early days of the colonies to the present. Hoffman creates dark characters: pain,... read more