World War II Mini-Reviews: Paris 7 A.M. and The World That We Knew

In June of 1937, Elizabeth Bishop travels to France with her college roommates. She is not yet a famous poet--she is just a young woman looking for adventure. She misses her mother and looks for solace from her mentor Marianne Moore or at the bottom of a bottle. During her time abroad, Elizabeth will fall in love, discover her passion for poetry, and smuggle Jewish children to safety.

Elizabeth Bishop is a poet loved by many people, myself and the author included. As Liza Wieland looked through Bishop's letters and meticulous journals, she discovered that there was no record of 1937. In this book, she imagines what might have happened during that gap. Unfortunately, it fell very flat for me. Wieland seemed to focus on the feel of Bishop's writing, instead of crafting her character. I didn't get a sense of who Elizabeth was, in reality or as the author might have imagined her. The description of the book is also a bit misleading, since very little of the plot has to do with getting Jewish children out of the country. Elizabeth Bishop was an extraordinary poet, and I hope that readers will read multiple books to better understand both the writer and her work.

Paris, 7 A.M.
By Liza Wieland
Simon Schuster June 2019
353 pages
Read via Netgalley

In 1941 Berlin, a woman knows she must get her daughter out of the country. She uses a somewhat unusual method, asking her rabbi to create a golem to take Lea across the border and keep her safe. The rabbi refuses, but his daughter Ettie is willing to bring the golem to life. Lea and the golem, who they name Ava, flee to France in the hope of finding safety. Ettie leaves home as well, and becomes a resistance fighter determined to avenge the deaths of her friends and family.

Alice Hoffman has a gift for combining myth with reality, and it is particularly vivid here. In a world where bombs are falling and children are murdered, does it seem impossible that a golem could come to life or a girl could communicate with birds? There is a lot going on here; readers follow several characters for years as they travel through Europe, but you will have the rare experience of wanting to stay with one character while wondering what is happening to another. Books about World War II are everywhere, but Hoffman's care for her characters and the intersection of history and fantasy, and cruelty and love make for a gripping read.

The World That We Knew
By Alice Hoffman
Simon & Schuster September 2019
384 pages
Read via Netgalley

Mini-reviews: Faithful and Behold the Dreamers

Shelby is a pretty typical teenage girl. She and her best friend Helene are attached at the hip until the night of the accident. Shelby is driving, but she isn't the one who is hurt. Instead, Helene is left in a coma and Shelby is left to deal with the consequences and guilt. She retreats from the world first to a mental institution and then into her parent's basement, Is it possible for Shelby to forgive herself and move on with her life when her best friend will never wake up?

Faithful is a novel that pays attention to all kinds of relationships: friendship, romance, and families. In some ways, it is a typical coming of age story as Shelby drifts away from and comes back to her parents and her small town and discovers who she is and what she wants out of life. She learns that it is possible to love someone while knowing they are not the person for you. But each step is made harder by her excruciating guilt as she wonders if she deserves any sort of happiness.

This book can be tough to read as Shelby sabotages her own life, but this is an Alice Hoffman story. That means there will always be just a bit of magic and the hope that these characters can find a happy ending,

Faithful
By Alice Hoffman
Simon and Schuster November 2016
272 pages
Read via Netgalley

In the fall of 2007, Jende Jonga gets an incredible opportunity. He starts a job as the chauffeur for Clark Edwards, an executive at Lehman Brothers. This job will give his family security and ensure that his wife Neni can continue in pharmacy school. As Jende becomes an integral part of the Edwards family, the lines between employer and employee become fuzzy. When the financial market and Lehman Brothers collapse, can either family escape the destruction?

Behold the Dreamers is a book that is both incredibly specific to the years before and after the financial crash and a universal look at trying to survive as an immigrant in America. Jende and Neni have come to America from Cameroon and they have big dreams for their futures and that of their small son. Through his job, Jende has a literal front row seat to the inner workings of the wealthy in New York City. He hears the business deals that his boss brokers in the back seat and drops him off at the hotels where he is unfaithful to his wife. He sees the heartbreak of the neglected wife trying to keep a brave face and her snobbery about other people. But Mbue has not taken the easy path of making the rich bad and the poor saintly. Instead, we get a multitude of complicated characters who are trying to do their best with what they have.

This is a book full of impossible choices and characters who get knocked down time and again by life. But somehow this story manages to encourage its readers that all is not lost. Even if America cannot grant all of our deepest desires, there are still moments of joy to be found on its shores.


Behold the Dreamers
By Imbolo Mbue
Random House August 2016
380 pages
Read via Netgalley

Review: A Marriage of Opposites

Rachel is part of a small group of Jews living on St. Thomas in the 19th century. Her parents are seen as pillars of the community, but Rachel dreams big and is not afraid to act or speak out. She dreams of controlling her own life, and perhaps even living in glamorous Paris. Her dreams are encouraged by the family maid Adelle and Adelle's daughter Jestine, who is Rachel's best friend. But Rachel's dreams come to an abrupt end as she is married off to a much older widower in an effort to save the family business. When Rachel's husband dies, she falls passionately in love with someone who is deemed completely inappropriate by her community. Is now the moment when Rachel can finally start writing her own story?

A Marriage of Opposites covers a lot of ground in one book. Readers see Rachel as she grows from an idealistic girl to a resigned young woman to a wife and mother who tries to balance the needs of her family and the desires of her own heart. Then the focus switches to her son as he defies convention in the same way that his mother did and decides to follow his dream of making art and going to Paris. Woven throughout are glimpses of what it means to have power and wealth and the dire consequences of not having those things. Rachel and her family are banned from their synagogue after she chooses to pursue a new relationship and her best friend Jestine has her heart irrevocably broken when people with more power and lighter skin take away the one she loves the most.

Although this book is about real people, the universal story here is about parents and children. Rachel dreamed for years about getting out from under her mother's oppressive control, but does the same thing to her own children without seeing the parallels. Camille bristles under his mother's direction, but his mother dreamed of Paris just as he does and fell in love with someone unsuitable just as he will.

I love Alice Hoffman. To date, she has written more than 30 novels and I will probably pick them all up at some point or another. As usual in Hoffman's writing, there is magic around the edges of a real story. In this case, Rachel is particularly attuned to the spirits of the island and perhaps, the spirits of ancestors in her Jewish community. While this is not my favorite Hoffman novel, it remains a testament to her ability to evoke a specific time and place. Some writers seem forced to stay in one time period, but Hoffman takes readers from 20th century NYC to the ancient fortress of Masada to the breathtaking island St. Thomas with equal skill.

The Marriage of Opposites

By Alice Hoffman

Simon and Schuster August 2015

384 pages

Read via Netgalley

Review: Skylight Confessions

Skylight Confessions

By Alice Hoffman

Back Bay Books February 2008

288 pages

From my shelves

Arlyn Singer is mourning the death of her father and vows that she will love and marry the next man she sees. When John Moody asks her for directions, they begin a passionate but tempestuous relationship. Together they move into "The Glass Slipper," an architectural wonder that is the Moody family home. The arrival of their son Sam does not bring them closer. Instead, John becomes more obsessed with his work and success and Arlyn and Sam are tragically lonely. After the birth of Blanca, Arlyn is diagnosed with cancer. Can this fragile family survive the pain of life and the hurt that they cause each other? 

Alice Hoffman is well known for her novel Practical Magic and she infuses her stories with a bit of magic. This book is no exception. From the opening pages, Arlyn is captivated by the idea of fate and true love. Her grief over losing her father is enormous but she is certain that she is about to meet the man she will love forever. As she reflects on her dad, she remembers the stories he used to tell her about people who could suddenly fly away in moments of danger. Images of birds and flying linger around the edges of the rest of this story - Arlyn's son Sam often sits on the roof as if he might fly away and the characters find bird feathers scattered around their home.

While there is magic on every page of this book, it is also achingly real. Arlyn and John have a broken relationship and their children suffer because of it. When Arlyn gets cancer, she knows that her children will not get the love and support that they need from John. A sense of loneliness lingers throughout this story, as the characters cannot or will not provide what their family members need from them. No magic spell can save them from the mistakes they make and the repercussions that will resonate through generations of the Moody family.

Skylight Confessions is the perfect read if you believe that magic is in the everyday and the barrier between life and death is not impermeable. This modern-day fairy tale shows readers the possibility of magic and the strength of love. 

Review: The Museum of Extraordinary Things

The Museum of Extraordinary Things

By Alice Hoffman

Scribner February 2014

368 pages

From the library

Two stories come together in a surprising and dazzling fashion in Alice Hoffman's newest novel The Museum of Extraordinary Things. Our heroine is the sheltered Coralie, who is a part of her father's Coney Island museum where the extraordinary and bizarre come out of the shadows. Coralie has webbed fingers and at her father's prompting, has trained herself to swim for extreme distances. She spends her days inside a tank in the museum, billed as a "mermaid." In the heart of New York City, Eddie Coen has escaped from his father and their traditional Orthodox lives to work among the city's thieves and runaways. When he becomes an apprentice to the famed photographer Moses Levy, he finds himself taking photographs of the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and drawn into a mystery that will change his life forever.

As I started reading this book, my first reaction was that this story was not as good as my favorite Hoffman book The Dovekeepers. And perhaps it's not. But that doesn't mean that you should leave this book by the wayside because it's still a strong story that will effortlessly draw you into 1911 New York City. There is a tension throughout the entire book between fire and water - the inferno that claimed the lives of the girls at the factory and the water where Coralie spends much of her time swimming. At some point in the novel, I found myself quickly flipping pages because Hoffman had made me care about these characters. 

This book achieves the difficult feat of being both too long and too short. There were parts where I thought that the story was really meandering. But I wanted more of the auxiliary characters -  the household servants who love and help Coralie, her dastardly father Professor Sardie, the men and women who are on exhibit at the museum, and the denizens of the underworld where Eddie lives and works. Our protagonists seemed like they were holding the door open so that we could peer into fascinating worlds, but the door was only open for a few brief pages. 

The Museum of Extraordinary Things would not be my suggestion for a reader who is just discovering what Hoffman can do with words and characters and magic. There are other stories that are stronger and more enduring. But this is a good book, one that reminds us of the power of human connection and the talent with which Ms. Hoffman can bring history to vivid and terrible life. 

Review: The Red Garden

The Red Garden

By Alice Hoffman

Broadway Paperbacks 2011

270 pages

From my shelves

Blackwell, Massachusetts may seem like an ordinary small town at first glance. It was founded in the 1700s by William and Hallie Brady and a few other brave families. Since then, children have been born and grandparents have died but the original families continue to live in the town. Things are not as simple as they may seem in Blackwell - the ghost of a young girl haunts the banks of the river, its inhabitants have unusual encounters with bears, and the soil in the garden of the Brady family home turns everything blood red. This town and its citizens have plenty of secrets, a lot of shared history, and maybe even a little magic. 

This is my second foray into the books of Alice Hoffman and I was not disappointed. Each chapter is distinct, but interconnected. One chapter might deal with the Brady family and then the next would be about the children of their neighbors. The characters we meet in these stories are the ones who don't quite fit within the narrow confines of their town's expectations - Hallie Brady, who single-handedly saved her fellow settlers from starvation during that first winter, the precocious daughter of the schoolteacher who keeps her mother's past a secret, and the mysterious fisherman's wife, who speaks to no one. 

Hoffman does so much within these short, heartfelt stories. We see 200 years of history through the lens of a tiny town, so change is slow but persistent. While reading, you may feel like you have climbed into a fairy tale. But magic can't always save the men and women of Blackwell from isolation, heartache, and terrible loss. The writing is gorgeous and I found myself lost in Hoffman's words, in the stories of her characters, and in this strange little town and its beloved legends. 

I would love to have had a family/town tree while reading this novel. I know that I missed some connections throughout. But I suppose that's alright - it just gives me an excuse to read these wonderful stories again. 

Review: The Dovekeepers

The Dovekeepers

By Alice Hoffman

Scribner October 2011

My review is up at the Atlantic Highlands Herald this morning. I really loved this book. Read my thoughts here.

Have an awesome weekend!