In Martha's vineyard, the granddaughter of a dying old woman comes to live with her, only to fall for the next door neighbor who is married and has a child. Through the ups and downs of the plot's tension, the explosion of suppressed desires, the young girl finds her way and each character involved arrives at a solution in his or her tangled life.

Serious reading as well as entertainment.

the in-depth insight to the inner workings of this novel's unusual characters. Even the smaller characters are drawn with delicate precision with Hoffman's excellent pen. The more unusual a character, the more we find him or her closer to our hearts: an elderly woman looking back inside her life earnestly and helping her granddaughter grow, a young couple going through the twisting roads of marriage, a blond giant who hides his height, himself, and his beauty, a teenage girl wrapped in her own ruthless passion as the result of being a product of an unhappy marriage, a little boy who is destined to become a dwarf but who finds his light at the end of a tunnel, a young intuitive mother, rejected by her father, feeling a similar rejection from her husband and falling to a phobia as a consequence.

Read other books by Alice Hoffman. I hope she writes more since I have read most of them so far.

good about people in general, since there were no real villains or angels. It also made me feel as lifted as if I've just read Emerson or some other poet I admire.

Alice Hoffman, born in New York City in 1952, grew up on Long Island. She attended Adelphi University and Stanford University's Creative Writing Center, receiving an MA in creative writing. She has written fourteen books among which are:
Property of, The Drowning Season, Angel Landing, White Horses, Fortune's Daughter, At Risk, Here on Earth, Seventh Heaven.

it is excellent reading filled with magic, spirituality, splendid characters and setting. And the writer's story telling abilities are simply heavenly. Her prose reads like poetry.

Interested in buying this? Support Writing.Com by making your purchase of Illumination Night   from Amazon.Com!

Created Aug 09, 2003 at 3:29pm • Submit your own review...