From Publishers Weekly
Winningham's narration is just right. Her pronunciation is clear but not exaggerated, and nicely combined with the rhythmic, conversational speed of a good storyteller. She has a rich voice with a good vocal range. This book is another of the wildly popular "ghost" romances that come under the rubric "woman's fiction," and another of Hoffman's dark fairy tales. Orphaned at 17, Arlie determines to love and marry the first man who comes down the street. This is John Moody, a "distant, quiet man" who ignores her and her children throughout their marriage, but is plagued by her ghost after her early death. Arlie's ghost is visible only to Moody and to the narrator, Meredith, who follows the ghost home to the glass house where Arlie lived out her miserable marriage and died. The book is loaded with telltale names and laborious symbols—ashes, dishes, stones, bones, birds, glass and all things red or white—but the characters are as human as fairy tale permits, and Hoffman's prose is lively and absorbing. This book will be a favorite of women's fiction and Hoffman fans.
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Hoffman works with her own private deck of tarot cards to create psychologically rich, mystical tales infused with a sexy form of magic realism sprung from the union of romance and tragedy. In her latest gothic fairy tale of doomed passion and indelible guilt, Arlyn, 17, is utterly alone in the world until, like a mermaid casting her spell over a lost sailor, she pulls John Moody into her orbit and refuses to let go. A student at Yale, he is the lackluster son of an architect famous for building a Connecticut house known as the Glass Slipper. In a sinister variation on the nursery rhyme about the woman who lived in a shoe, the mismatched couple dwell precariously in the comfortless glass mansion with their solemn son, Sam, and, later, a daughter, Blanca, who isn't even a year old when cancer claims Arlyn. But death doesn't dispel Arlyn's powers. As birds inexplicitly flock to the Glass Slipper, dishes break without being touched, and soot rains down, Sam, a promising artist, loses his way in a labyrinth of narcotics, even as help arrives in the form of a young woman also haunted by her dead. Hoffman's shimmering, multigenerational melodrama bewitches with supernatural imagery. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Haunting. . . . This isn't just Hoffman's best recent novel; it's one of the best of a distinguished list. . . . Long after the last page is turned, the characters and their stories are impossible to forget." (St. Louis Post-Dispatch Gail Pennington)
"Wholly original and haunting." (Parade)
"Achingly beautiful and filled with heart-wrenchingly real characters: one of Hoffman's best." (Kirkus Reviews (starred review))
"Hoffman's shimmering, multigenerational melodrama bewitches with supernatural imagery while imaginatively dramatizing all-too-common heartaches." (Booklist Donna Seaman)
"Among the many pleasures of Skylight Confessions is a sense of continuous corner-turning, a chain of surprises. . . . Skylight Confessions is about the unresolvable contradictions that lie at the heart of life." (Boston Globe Ann Harleman)
"Alice Hoffman has written her most spellbinding, accomplished novel yet. . . . Although this is Hoffman's nineteenth book, it feels utterly fresh. Her voice -- touched by the cadences of fairy tales -- buoys us through the novel's saddest currents." (More Andrea Chapin)
"Alice Hoffman remains a literary sorceress par excellence. . . . In a novel that unfolds like a dream, Hoffman reminds readers that love and family create the most potent magic of all." (Philadelphia Inquirer Martha Woodall)
"Hoffman's brand of magical realism squeezes caring out of hard-to-reach places and ends up being a celebration of love." (Good Housekeeping)
"Hoffman is one of our great storytellers and one who knows the American family in all its many facets. In Skylight Confessions, she has once again written a story and characters that are truly unforgettable. A novel to be savored." (Baltimore Sun Victoria A. Brownworth)
About the Author
Alice Hoffman is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 15 acclaimed novels beloved by teens and adults, from The Foretelling, Green Angel, and Aquamarine to The Ice Queen, Here on Earth (an Oprah Book Club selection), and Practical Magic, which was made into a major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock.
Mare Winningham's reading is level, her delivery almost factual, providing strong roots that ground us when Hoffman leaps into moments of magical realism in telling the story of Arlyn Singer. On the day of her father's funeral, 17-year-old Arlyn waits for her true love to show up. Enter the distant John Moody, an unlikely candidate. Winningham's even tones seem to record the characters' resignation--their adjustment to a bad marriage, Arlyn's conclusion of a love affair, and her acceptance of her own death. In later parts of the audio, Winningham's steady narration records the descent of Arlyn's lost son into drugs and despair, the pain of her daughter, and the sadness of Arlyn herself, who haunts John's life and home, looking for resolution. S.W. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
