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The Red Garden
The Red Garden introduces us to the luminous and haunting world of Blackwell, Massachusetts, capturing the unexpected turns in its history and in our own lives.
In exquisite prose, Hoffman offers a transforming glimpse of small-town America, presenting us with some three hundred years of passion, dark secrets, loyalty, and redemption in a web of tales where characters' lives are intertwined by fate and by their own actions.
From the town's founder, a brave young woman from England who has no fear of blizzards or bears, to the young man who runs away to New York City with only his dog for company, the characters in The Red Garden are extraordinary and vivid: a young wounded Civil War soldier who is saved by a passionate neighbor, a woman who meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet who falls in love with a blind man, a mysterious traveler who comes to town in the year when summer never arrives.
At the center of everyone's life is a mysterious garden where only red plants can grow, and where the truth can be found by those who dare to look.
Beautifully crafted, shimmering with magic, The Red Garden is as unforgettable as it is moving.
In exquisite prose, Hoffman offers a transforming glimpse of small-town America, presenting us with some three hundred years of passion, dark secrets, loyalty, and redemption in a web of tales where characters' lives are intertwined by fate and by their own actions.
From the town's founder, a brave young woman from England who has no fear of blizzards or bears, to the young man who runs away to New York City with only his dog for company, the characters in The Red Garden are extraordinary and vivid: a young wounded Civil War soldier who is saved by a passionate neighbor, a woman who meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet who falls in love with a blind man, a mysterious traveler who comes to town in the year when summer never arrives.
At the center of everyone's life is a mysterious garden where only red plants can grow, and where the truth can be found by those who dare to look.
Beautifully crafted, shimmering with magic, The Red Garden is as unforgettable as it is moving.
270 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
2077 people are currently reading
18128 people want to read
About the author
Alice Hoffman
140 books24.8k followersAlice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including The World That We Knew; The Marriage of Opposites; The Red Garden; The Museum of Extraordinary Things; The Dovekeepers; Here on Earth, an Oprah’s Book Club selection; and the Practical Magic series, including Practical
Magic; Magic Lessons; The Rules of Magic, a selection of Reese’s Book Club; and The Book of Magic. She lives near Boston.
Magic; Magic Lessons; The Rules of Magic, a selection of Reese’s Book Club; and The Book of Magic. She lives near Boston.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 3,135 reviews
October 6, 2022
Hoffman is in familiar, magical turf in this collection of charming and engaging, if not always happy stories. The unifying core is the history of a town, from founding, as Bearsville, which includes a very significant nod to Romulus and Remus, to present, Blackwell, MA, and more particularly with a special garden behind the founder’s house, the Red Garden of the title. It has some lightly magical properties. There are mythical figures to be seen here, as well as spirits, some folks who are of questionable species, people with craft-y skills, people who have been damaged by the world, and those with a drive to wander. Bears figure prominently, both as a source of comfort and danger. Although there are dark doings in some of the stories, I found them, overall, delightful.
Alice Hoffman - image fr0m the Early Bird Books
Hoffman is a big fan of fairy tales and many of the stories here would fit quite nicely into that genre. There are plenty of classic references as well, from a Tree of Life to elements of the founding of Rome, and more recent lore, such as Johnny Appleseed. And any garden must, of course, refer back to the first one. This is a plot rich with literary and cultural references and those who enjoy digging in such soil will emerge with happily muddy hands.
Through all is a fascination with our attachment to the land. The Tree of Life stands in nicely for the life-giving roots the Red Garden’s characters grow in their home. The red of the primal garden flows through several of the stories in which objects with a source in, or touched by the garden, take on the color. There are nods toward transcendentalism, with characters finding solace only when communing with nature. Some shapes are even shifted. Characters flow from one story into the next, which proceed in chronological order, children in a story appear as adults in a later one. Characters who die early may appear as spirits later.
One gripe I have with the book is that the characters are often very engaging and it was disappointing to have to leave their side after only a few pages. I was delighted by The Red Garden. Alice Hoffman always offers a good read and I found this one better than most.
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal and FB pages
Other Hoffman books I have reviewed:
-----Local Girls
-----Green Angel
-----Blackbird House
-----The Ice Queen
-----The Dovekeepers
-----The Rules of Magic
Alice Hoffman - image fr0m the Early Bird Books
Hoffman is a big fan of fairy tales and many of the stories here would fit quite nicely into that genre. There are plenty of classic references as well, from a Tree of Life to elements of the founding of Rome, and more recent lore, such as Johnny Appleseed. And any garden must, of course, refer back to the first one. This is a plot rich with literary and cultural references and those who enjoy digging in such soil will emerge with happily muddy hands.
Through all is a fascination with our attachment to the land. The Tree of Life stands in nicely for the life-giving roots the Red Garden’s characters grow in their home. The red of the primal garden flows through several of the stories in which objects with a source in, or touched by the garden, take on the color. There are nods toward transcendentalism, with characters finding solace only when communing with nature. Some shapes are even shifted. Characters flow from one story into the next, which proceed in chronological order, children in a story appear as adults in a later one. Characters who die early may appear as spirits later.
One gripe I have with the book is that the characters are often very engaging and it was disappointing to have to leave their side after only a few pages. I was delighted by The Red Garden. Alice Hoffman always offers a good read and I found this one better than most.
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal and FB pages
Other Hoffman books I have reviewed:
-----Local Girls
-----Green Angel
-----Blackbird House
-----The Ice Queen
-----The Dovekeepers
-----The Rules of Magic
October 19, 2011
While I enjoyed each individual story, the 2-star rating comes mostly from the frustration I had due to the fact that the stories were just far apart enough in time and with just similar enough names (given names as well as surnames) that I was never sure who was related to whom and what the lineage was. Two things that could have helped with this would have been a) to make the stories just a bit closer in time, historically, or b) to provide a family tree chart at the front of the book. Or both. As it was, I eventually stopped trying to connect everyone, but it detracted from my overall enjoyment of the book. I especially liked how "Dead Husband's Meadow" became "Husband's Meadow" and eventually "Band's Meadow" and wished there had been more references like this. "Harry's Bear" was mentioned once, and could have been a great place name to see a century later, but we never heard it again. Red Garden had a lot more potential than it delivered, ultimately, and I was a bit disappointed in it because I usually have a much stronger connection to Alice Hoffman's books. My two favorites remain Blue Diary and The River King.
November 30, 2017
Writers have this hankering to create fictional landscapes and populate them with characters who cut across narratives. Marquez's Macondo, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and Hardy's Wessex are examples which readily spring to mind. Over the course of many stories, these countries of the imagination take on a life of their own and will generate their own myths, histories and legends - living on even after their creators are no more, as Lovecraft's Chthulu Mythos does. In this book of collected short stories, Alice Hoffman creates her own landscape of the mind - the town of Blackwell, Massachusetts, hidden by the Hightop Mountains - "a craggy Berkshire County landmark that separated Blackwell from the rest of the world".
Of course, Blackwell has not always been called by that name - originally it was Bearsville, when it was founded in 1750. The narrative starts with that story, the tale of the brave and hardy Hallie Brady, who carved out the town almost single-handed. It is a fairy tale, of young Harry Partridge who was suckled by a she-bear and of Halley Brady herself who forms a blood bond with the bear, and disappears into the woods on its death.
Then the stories follow, roughly in intervals of 20-30 years, as America becomes more 'civilised' and the history of the previous stories move into the realm of legends, and ultimately into the territory of myth. There is Halley and her she-bear: there is the "Tree of Life" at the centre of the town, reportedly planted by Johnny Appleseed (actually, John Chapman, a drifter who came town in his teens) which is never without fruit: Amy Starr who drowns in the Eel River and becomes a ghost, and finally a character in a play enacted every year like a ritual. Characters from one story appear in another, told through an entirely different perspective from a different point of view - and most importantly, they are all related in some way or other to one another, as the surnames which keep on reappearing show (Bradley, Partridge, Mott, Starr, etc.) - all descended from a handful of original settlers.
There are shades of familiar fairy tale motifs in these shorts: the fisherman's wife who is actually a mermaid, the monster in the woods who falls for a pretty girl - and most prominently in the title story "The Red Garden", in the mystery of the piece of land which turned everything planted in it red. And when the last story ends with a burial, we become aware of what the author is trying to say.
The soil is alive, so are the people who have passed, and the people who have yet to come. This is America, a comparatively young land, but with a heart which is centuries old.
Five well-deserved stars.
Of course, Blackwell has not always been called by that name - originally it was Bearsville, when it was founded in 1750. The narrative starts with that story, the tale of the brave and hardy Hallie Brady, who carved out the town almost single-handed. It is a fairy tale, of young Harry Partridge who was suckled by a she-bear and of Halley Brady herself who forms a blood bond with the bear, and disappears into the woods on its death.
Then the stories follow, roughly in intervals of 20-30 years, as America becomes more 'civilised' and the history of the previous stories move into the realm of legends, and ultimately into the territory of myth. There is Halley and her she-bear: there is the "Tree of Life" at the centre of the town, reportedly planted by Johnny Appleseed (actually, John Chapman, a drifter who came town in his teens) which is never without fruit: Amy Starr who drowns in the Eel River and becomes a ghost, and finally a character in a play enacted every year like a ritual. Characters from one story appear in another, told through an entirely different perspective from a different point of view - and most importantly, they are all related in some way or other to one another, as the surnames which keep on reappearing show (Bradley, Partridge, Mott, Starr, etc.) - all descended from a handful of original settlers.
There are shades of familiar fairy tale motifs in these shorts: the fisherman's wife who is actually a mermaid, the monster in the woods who falls for a pretty girl - and most prominently in the title story "The Red Garden", in the mystery of the piece of land which turned everything planted in it red. And when the last story ends with a burial, we become aware of what the author is trying to say.
James thought about the garden, with soil so red it seemed to have a bloody, beating heart. He thought about it where it was people went when they died, and how when he squinted he could see Cody, racing back and forth, barking, how his father seemed to stand right there on the riverbank, turning back the bees, closer than he'd ever been before.
The soil is alive, so are the people who have passed, and the people who have yet to come. This is America, a comparatively young land, but with a heart which is centuries old.
Five well-deserved stars.
November 30, 2016
I'm new to Alice Hoffman and starting out with her lesser known books. This was the perfect book to read early on. It's a series of linked short stories taking place in the town of Blackwell, Massachusetts over a span of 300 years. A few of the stories were so fascinating I wanted to hear more. From only a few of Hoffman's books, I can see the magical realism is strong (which I love). I'm not sure why but when I listen to/read Hoffman's books, I think of books by Sarah Addison Allen. Both drip in magical realism. I find Allen's books to be so comforting, and perhaps that is why I think of them while reading these works. Hoffman's books have that same magical, comforting, feeling.
I listened to this one via audio but also had the digital print to refer to. Which was perfect as there was one story I wanted to revisit and did so via the print. I look forward to reading more from Hoffman. Perhaps the next one, it will be extra cozy, with a read under a blanket near the fireplace. As there is nothing more comforting to me than that.
I listened to this one via audio but also had the digital print to refer to. Which was perfect as there was one story I wanted to revisit and did so via the print. I look forward to reading more from Hoffman. Perhaps the next one, it will be extra cozy, with a read under a blanket near the fireplace. As there is nothing more comforting to me than that.
December 9, 2018
What another joy it was to read The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman its only short 270 pages but again she takes on a magical journey of the descendants of Blackwell Massachusetts it was formally known as Bears Ville for the obvious reasons, Miss Hoffman opens up with 4 families who risk all in the coldest winter William brady is looking for a wife he meets Hallie who was an orphan she was 14 he was 40 they married & William set out on an expedition along with Hallie who was self sufficient they get four families to join them , but Hallie soon works out her husband is a charlatan, he leads them in circle.
Hallie knows how to survive the cold winters amongst bears & eel lake she will kill to survive but the men in the other families don't have those skills. The short stories involve the siblings of Hallie & William Brady, sons of fathers , daughters or cousins etc. I found this very fast paced & was a very easy read, their was death, life & hardships encountered through 300 years of the Brady's descendants , was a joy to read & the characters were engaging I loved how every story throughout was somehow related to the previous one just finished Miss Hoffman weaves a tale of realism in this book, the hardships families endured even though the war was raging their survival was paramount another gem by Alice Hoffman have 2 more to read The Ice Queen & The Dove keeper will read both by the end of the year hopefully, actually loved the setting in the wilderness with the bears coyotes & collies it was atmospheric well written loved everything about this book.
Hallie knows how to survive the cold winters amongst bears & eel lake she will kill to survive but the men in the other families don't have those skills. The short stories involve the siblings of Hallie & William Brady, sons of fathers , daughters or cousins etc. I found this very fast paced & was a very easy read, their was death, life & hardships encountered through 300 years of the Brady's descendants , was a joy to read & the characters were engaging I loved how every story throughout was somehow related to the previous one just finished Miss Hoffman weaves a tale of realism in this book, the hardships families endured even though the war was raging their survival was paramount another gem by Alice Hoffman have 2 more to read The Ice Queen & The Dove keeper will read both by the end of the year hopefully, actually loved the setting in the wilderness with the bears coyotes & collies it was atmospheric well written loved everything about this book.
August 4, 2023
A magical realism based family saga, my favorite. Usually I prefer the Latinx variety but with Hoffman’s new book coming out later this month, I could not resist a return to one of her stories of a families rooted in magic. These stories, whether or not the characters realize they have magical tendencies, lend themselves to summer vacation reads. A different summer, it took me all of two afternoons on the beach to read Marriage of Opposites. Here I am, back for another week at the beach, and I decided to immerse myself in a magical world once again.
A garden that turns all soil and plants red. An apple tree named the Tree of Life known to be planted by Johnny Appleseed himself, which is a protective beacon in town. Townsfolk who communicate with bears and collies as familiars. An apparition of a six year old girl dressed in blue who appears to those in need. These are everyday occurrences in the town of Blackwell, Massachusetts, a town first settled in 1790. Over the course of two hundred years the town’s founders: the Brady’s, Partridges, Motts, Starrs, and Kellys, have intermarried many times over, resulting in at least a few members of each generation with long flaming red hair. These people are descended directly from Hailee Brady, the brave founder who communicated with bears and saved the town from starvation in its first winter. Every year on August 1, Blackwell comes together to honor Hailee Brady for her bravery on founder’s day, and her known descendent in each generation inherits her home in the center of town with its garden known for turning all its plants red.
At under three hundred pages, The Red Garden is a series of vignettes about each successive generation of Blackwell over the course of two hundred years. Some readers have noted that these read more like short stories, but each chapter leads to the next, telling the town’s history. One town historian notes that what belongs in Blackwell stays in Blackwell, as few outsiders stay for longer than a few month, hence the number of intermarriages between the town’s original five families. There was once WPA writer Ben Levy who was tasked with writing about rural folklore but he realized he belonged in the canyons of New York. Ava Cooper and her daughter Tessa arrived one summer to work at the history museum. Both women wore seductive clothes and baked sinful cakes yet were run out of town after a few months, the cake recipes surviving long after they did. The outsiders brought spice to Blackwell that otherwise had one watering hole Jack Straws Bar and Grill and few outlets for people to enjoy themselves. With a wilderness of a river, mountain, bears who communicate with humans, and a garden that could grant its caretakers true love, Blackwell had little need for activities or interlopers. The town survived taking care of itself.
One does not have to be a true witch to be magical. With Hoffman’s other famous magical family, the Owenses, the witchcraft and magic was apparent from the first page. In Blackwell, generations of townspeople grew up hearing the myths of the Tree of Life, the apparition, and the red garden. None of the descendants of the town’s founders necessarily exhibited magical tendencies but the town they came from held a pull that allowed these families to stay for generations. What belongs in Blackwell, stays in Blackwell. With independent characters like Kate Partridge and James Mott who desired to get out of town, somehow their history rooted them to town to embrace their heritage. Whether it was a chance glance at the apparition or meeting with a bear or collie, those who always desired to get as far from Blackwell as possible seemed to return to the town that had a magical sway on them.
I eagerly await Hoffman’s new book that is due out this month that returns to a town much like Blackwell. Needless to say, I am giddy. Her brand of magical realism that allows for extraordinary occurrences in everyday life is among my favorite, and few American authors insert magic into their books as well as she does. With memorable characters and town where true love just seems to happen, the Red Garden, while not as well known as the Practical Magic series, is just as full of these magical happenings that I enjoy. While not on my radar at the beginning of the summer, The Red Garden has snuck in and become a highlight of my summer reading.
4 stars
A garden that turns all soil and plants red. An apple tree named the Tree of Life known to be planted by Johnny Appleseed himself, which is a protective beacon in town. Townsfolk who communicate with bears and collies as familiars. An apparition of a six year old girl dressed in blue who appears to those in need. These are everyday occurrences in the town of Blackwell, Massachusetts, a town first settled in 1790. Over the course of two hundred years the town’s founders: the Brady’s, Partridges, Motts, Starrs, and Kellys, have intermarried many times over, resulting in at least a few members of each generation with long flaming red hair. These people are descended directly from Hailee Brady, the brave founder who communicated with bears and saved the town from starvation in its first winter. Every year on August 1, Blackwell comes together to honor Hailee Brady for her bravery on founder’s day, and her known descendent in each generation inherits her home in the center of town with its garden known for turning all its plants red.
At under three hundred pages, The Red Garden is a series of vignettes about each successive generation of Blackwell over the course of two hundred years. Some readers have noted that these read more like short stories, but each chapter leads to the next, telling the town’s history. One town historian notes that what belongs in Blackwell stays in Blackwell, as few outsiders stay for longer than a few month, hence the number of intermarriages between the town’s original five families. There was once WPA writer Ben Levy who was tasked with writing about rural folklore but he realized he belonged in the canyons of New York. Ava Cooper and her daughter Tessa arrived one summer to work at the history museum. Both women wore seductive clothes and baked sinful cakes yet were run out of town after a few months, the cake recipes surviving long after they did. The outsiders brought spice to Blackwell that otherwise had one watering hole Jack Straws Bar and Grill and few outlets for people to enjoy themselves. With a wilderness of a river, mountain, bears who communicate with humans, and a garden that could grant its caretakers true love, Blackwell had little need for activities or interlopers. The town survived taking care of itself.
One does not have to be a true witch to be magical. With Hoffman’s other famous magical family, the Owenses, the witchcraft and magic was apparent from the first page. In Blackwell, generations of townspeople grew up hearing the myths of the Tree of Life, the apparition, and the red garden. None of the descendants of the town’s founders necessarily exhibited magical tendencies but the town they came from held a pull that allowed these families to stay for generations. What belongs in Blackwell, stays in Blackwell. With independent characters like Kate Partridge and James Mott who desired to get out of town, somehow their history rooted them to town to embrace their heritage. Whether it was a chance glance at the apparition or meeting with a bear or collie, those who always desired to get as far from Blackwell as possible seemed to return to the town that had a magical sway on them.
I eagerly await Hoffman’s new book that is due out this month that returns to a town much like Blackwell. Needless to say, I am giddy. Her brand of magical realism that allows for extraordinary occurrences in everyday life is among my favorite, and few American authors insert magic into their books as well as she does. With memorable characters and town where true love just seems to happen, the Red Garden, while not as well known as the Practical Magic series, is just as full of these magical happenings that I enjoy. While not on my radar at the beginning of the summer, The Red Garden has snuck in and become a highlight of my summer reading.
4 stars
April 12, 2011
Due to my busy schedule, I often read right before I go to bed. So for me, the mark of a good book is one that I pick up about half an hour before bedtime, and refuse to put down until my eyes are absolutely closing with fatigue. The Red Garden is such a book. It's magical, whimsical, powerful. Although the stories making up a patchwork history of Blackwell, MA are set in different times with (mostly) different casts of characters, you can trace the common themes and family names that wind their way through the tales like vines. I would absolutely read it again, and recommend to discerning bookfiend friends.
July 27, 2024
So this was a really great book to choose for the Sleepy Hollow square. Taking place in a small town in Massachusetts, Alice Hoffman follows the town founders and descendants of Blackwell, Massachusetts. Mixing in historical incidents as well as some magical realism, the town and the residents feel like a very real place after a few chapters. The flow between chapters is great and sometimes a person you read about as a child appears in a short story later. I do wish that a family tree had been included so you could follow those you read in the stories and trace their antecedents. The biggest tie is that a garden that was started by a woman named Hallie Brady has soil that is red and anything that blooms there comes out red too. Readers get to find out what was buried there and the ties that the Brady, Partridge, Mott, and Starrs all have the oldest house in town as well as to the red garden.
"The Bear's House" (5 stars)-We found out that a town formerly named Bearsville, was founded in 1750, but changed it's name to Blackwell in 1786. Hoffman introduces you to the town's founders in this one, but focuses on a woman named Hallie Brady. Hoffman allows readers to see at this point, that what you may believe about someone is often messed up with white lies as well as outright falsehoods. We see how Hallie and others managed to survive in Bearsville and how a bear and its cub came to mean so much to Hallie.
"Eight Nights of Love" (3 stars)-This one was okay. It takes place in 1792 and you get to hear how the supposed Tree of Life in the town of Blackwell was planted by the one and only Johnny Appleseed. A young woman is infatuated with Johnny after the death of her mother and husband.
"The Year There Was No Summer" (5 stars)-This was one of the most heartbreaking of the stories. Reading about two sisters (Mary and Amy) who will be evoked time and time again in later stories in this book.
"Owl and Mouse" (3 stars)-This one takes place in 1848 and follows a young woman named Emily who sounds quite familiar.
"The River at Home" (4 stars)-This story takes place in 1863 and has the town men leaving to join the Union during the Civil War. A young widow along with her husband's father are left grieving. When a young man who also went to war and lost a leg returns, they both end up finding the strength to go on.
"The Truth About My Mother" (5 stars)-This story starts in 1903 and the narrator is the daughter of the school teacher that the town of Blackwell hires. We get to find out about both of their histories and how they left Brooklyn for Blackwell.
"The Principles of Devotion" (5 stars)-This story starts in 1918 and the young woman who was the narrator of the last story is the subject of this story. The narrator in this one is a young girl called Azurine. Azurine is devoted to her older sister Sara who is dying of the Spanish Flu that has killed off a lot of the town. The younger sister agrees to care for her sister's dog that refuses to leave her side and later her grave.
"The Fisherman's Wife" (5 stars)-This one has more magical realism than most of the stories and was really well done. A young man comes to hear about folk tales in Blackwell in 1935. Instead he finds that he may be part of one.
"Kiss and Tell" (5 stars)-This story takes place in 1945 and follows Hannah Partridge who we hear about in "The Principles of Devotion." Now she's older and living in her family home alone. Her sister Azurine has gone off to take care of injured and dying men due to the Second War World. When a traveling group of actors comes through Blackwell, something in Hannah finally wakes up.
"The Monster of Blackwell" (5 stars)-This story taking place in 1956 follows Hannah's niece Kate Partridge. Kate meets a young man who is not quite a man and not quite a bear. This story was more brutal than any that came before it I thought. I loved it though, and felt the ending was bitter sweet.
"Sin" (4 stars)-This story takes place in 1961 and a young girl desperate for a friend, meets someone new who moves to Blackwell. Too bad jealousy and shame turn things upside down. The ending of this one was very sad I thought, and the young girl who is the narrator in this one, Carla, we get mention of in one of the later stories though.
"Black Rabbit" (3 stars)-This one takes place in 1966 and follows the Mott brothers who we got introduced to in "Sin." I have to say that I thought this one was a bit draggy compared to the other stories. We also get to see how a commune gets set up near Blackwell that doesn't do so well with the whole peace and love thing.
"The Red Garden" (5 stars)-Taking place in 1986, this story follows Kate's daughter Louise who has returned home to her family's home to live again. She doesn't know if she wants to sell the house or move on, but finds herself drawn back to her family's red garden. The red garden causes something in her to change and has her thinking of a young man she hasn't seen since she was a child.
"King of the Bees" (5 stars)-Is the last story in the book and I would imagine takes place in the 1990s or there about due it being about Louise's son, James. I think this was a lovely way to anchor all of the stories. You get to see some echoes of past stories in this one. You have parents doing their best to keep their son alive and healthy and him pushing at anything that has him chained to them. But in the end, he realizes what his father felt for him after he passes and now what he feels as a father.
"The Bear's House" (5 stars)-We found out that a town formerly named Bearsville, was founded in 1750, but changed it's name to Blackwell in 1786. Hoffman introduces you to the town's founders in this one, but focuses on a woman named Hallie Brady. Hoffman allows readers to see at this point, that what you may believe about someone is often messed up with white lies as well as outright falsehoods. We see how Hallie and others managed to survive in Bearsville and how a bear and its cub came to mean so much to Hallie.
"Eight Nights of Love" (3 stars)-This one was okay. It takes place in 1792 and you get to hear how the supposed Tree of Life in the town of Blackwell was planted by the one and only Johnny Appleseed. A young woman is infatuated with Johnny after the death of her mother and husband.
"The Year There Was No Summer" (5 stars)-This was one of the most heartbreaking of the stories. Reading about two sisters (Mary and Amy) who will be evoked time and time again in later stories in this book.
"Owl and Mouse" (3 stars)-This one takes place in 1848 and follows a young woman named Emily who sounds quite familiar.
"The River at Home" (4 stars)-This story takes place in 1863 and has the town men leaving to join the Union during the Civil War. A young widow along with her husband's father are left grieving. When a young man who also went to war and lost a leg returns, they both end up finding the strength to go on.
"The Truth About My Mother" (5 stars)-This story starts in 1903 and the narrator is the daughter of the school teacher that the town of Blackwell hires. We get to find out about both of their histories and how they left Brooklyn for Blackwell.
"The Principles of Devotion" (5 stars)-This story starts in 1918 and the young woman who was the narrator of the last story is the subject of this story. The narrator in this one is a young girl called Azurine. Azurine is devoted to her older sister Sara who is dying of the Spanish Flu that has killed off a lot of the town. The younger sister agrees to care for her sister's dog that refuses to leave her side and later her grave.
"The Fisherman's Wife" (5 stars)-This one has more magical realism than most of the stories and was really well done. A young man comes to hear about folk tales in Blackwell in 1935. Instead he finds that he may be part of one.
"Kiss and Tell" (5 stars)-This story takes place in 1945 and follows Hannah Partridge who we hear about in "The Principles of Devotion." Now she's older and living in her family home alone. Her sister Azurine has gone off to take care of injured and dying men due to the Second War World. When a traveling group of actors comes through Blackwell, something in Hannah finally wakes up.
"The Monster of Blackwell" (5 stars)-This story taking place in 1956 follows Hannah's niece Kate Partridge. Kate meets a young man who is not quite a man and not quite a bear. This story was more brutal than any that came before it I thought. I loved it though, and felt the ending was bitter sweet.
"Sin" (4 stars)-This story takes place in 1961 and a young girl desperate for a friend, meets someone new who moves to Blackwell. Too bad jealousy and shame turn things upside down. The ending of this one was very sad I thought, and the young girl who is the narrator in this one, Carla, we get mention of in one of the later stories though.
"Black Rabbit" (3 stars)-This one takes place in 1966 and follows the Mott brothers who we got introduced to in "Sin." I have to say that I thought this one was a bit draggy compared to the other stories. We also get to see how a commune gets set up near Blackwell that doesn't do so well with the whole peace and love thing.
"The Red Garden" (5 stars)-Taking place in 1986, this story follows Kate's daughter Louise who has returned home to her family's home to live again. She doesn't know if she wants to sell the house or move on, but finds herself drawn back to her family's red garden. The red garden causes something in her to change and has her thinking of a young man she hasn't seen since she was a child.
"King of the Bees" (5 stars)-Is the last story in the book and I would imagine takes place in the 1990s or there about due it being about Louise's son, James. I think this was a lovely way to anchor all of the stories. You get to see some echoes of past stories in this one. You have parents doing their best to keep their son alive and healthy and him pushing at anything that has him chained to them. But in the end, he realizes what his father felt for him after he passes and now what he feels as a father.
February 22, 2011
Most reviews of The Red Garden see it as a series of linked stories covering the history of small Blackwell, MA (aka Bearville) from its founding in 1750 to almost the present day (1990s). I began reading the book this way but it started to feel repetitious. The stories are too tenuously connected to be read as a novel-like series of linked stories. The sister of a character in one story may appear on the fringes of the next, but the significance is hard to find.
I enjoyed the book more as I began to read it as a piece of experimental fiction, a Tarot deck of about a dozen characters—human or not—that Hoffmann continually reshuffles and deals into new configurations. To wit:
The Red-Haired Woman/Girl
The Solitary Man/Lost Boy
The Lover
The Outsider
The Newcomer
The Bear
The Dog
The Eel River
The Apple Tree
The Meadow
The Museum
The Red Garden (aka the Private Grave)
The Red-Haired Woman/Girl begins as Hallie Brady, the naïve bride of William Brady, an excellent salesman but hapless pioneer, who convinces three other families to join him on a journey to colonize a new town in the West. They get as far as Bearsville, located on The Eel River, where they are snowed in for the winter. They would have died (as in all good pioneer stories) except for Hallie’s resourcefulness and her strange-but-wondrous relationship with a hibernating bear.
From these seeds grows a town, started by the four founding families, visited by The Outsiders (including Johnny Appleseed, who plants The Apple Tree) and The Newcomers (who become staples of the community—or not). The roles and the stories change with the times and with the particular characters, subtly suggesting that outcomes may differ depending on a single choice or character trait.
The elements of the setting are as much characters as are the people. The Museum reflects the town’s fortune, prospering when the town does and closing when it doesn’t. The Meadow which a disillusioned Hallie Brady wishfully named “Dead Husband’s Meadow” evolves into Husband’s Meadow and finally to Band’s Meadow, as the people in the town become less tolerant of irony and difference. The Eel River feeds (and is fed by) the town and provides a supply of leather for export. And the titular Red Garden is also the Private Grave, where nothing is planted but dead hopes or everything that’s planted grows red.
Throughout the book, Hoffman’s language is as haunting as it is in her 20 or so other books. She shows a new world inside of our own world. The two may not be as different as one might think.
I enjoyed the book more as I began to read it as a piece of experimental fiction, a Tarot deck of about a dozen characters—human or not—that Hoffmann continually reshuffles and deals into new configurations. To wit:
The Red-Haired Woman/Girl
The Solitary Man/Lost Boy
The Lover
The Outsider
The Newcomer
The Bear
The Dog
The Eel River
The Apple Tree
The Meadow
The Museum
The Red Garden (aka the Private Grave)
The Red-Haired Woman/Girl begins as Hallie Brady, the naïve bride of William Brady, an excellent salesman but hapless pioneer, who convinces three other families to join him on a journey to colonize a new town in the West. They get as far as Bearsville, located on The Eel River, where they are snowed in for the winter. They would have died (as in all good pioneer stories) except for Hallie’s resourcefulness and her strange-but-wondrous relationship with a hibernating bear.
From these seeds grows a town, started by the four founding families, visited by The Outsiders (including Johnny Appleseed, who plants The Apple Tree) and The Newcomers (who become staples of the community—or not). The roles and the stories change with the times and with the particular characters, subtly suggesting that outcomes may differ depending on a single choice or character trait.
The elements of the setting are as much characters as are the people. The Museum reflects the town’s fortune, prospering when the town does and closing when it doesn’t. The Meadow which a disillusioned Hallie Brady wishfully named “Dead Husband’s Meadow” evolves into Husband’s Meadow and finally to Band’s Meadow, as the people in the town become less tolerant of irony and difference. The Eel River feeds (and is fed by) the town and provides a supply of leather for export. And the titular Red Garden is also the Private Grave, where nothing is planted but dead hopes or everything that’s planted grows red.
Throughout the book, Hoffman’s language is as haunting as it is in her 20 or so other books. She shows a new world inside of our own world. The two may not be as different as one might think.
March 21, 2013
A multi-century historical novel set in the Berkshires seemed, in theory, like a pleasant diversion, but I found this book pretty unengaging. Rather than some kind of intergenerational epic, it comes across more like a collection of short stories in which characters are somehow related but are also so shallowly depicted that it's hard enough to remember whom you're reading about, never mind how they fit into the bigger picture of families and events.
Many of the stories felt unfinished, or finished insignificantly and I kept waiting for ends to be tied up, or at least revisited. In fact, for about the first third of the book I was sure it would snap out of the superficial mode and start to follow particular characters more deeply, using the first third as some meaningful backstory. But no, the whole thing went on in the same vein.
The idea of places and objects that show up again and again through time, relating to different characters in different eras is pretty fascinating, but I think, because the characters were so under-developed, and one didn't care that much about any one in particular, it was hard to fully appreciate the weighty significance as many encountered the recurrent tropes.
I admit, the use of one house, described through time from being a town founder's first, hard-won abode in the 18th century to its tenancy by later relations and its final position as the town historical museum in the modern era did strike a chord with me. Perhaps because I find house histories so fascinating, or because I've spent a lot of time in historical houses which are no longer in private hands (especially as a docent in a house museum). Somehow, this story made it more real to me that these museums were once, real, vital, every day places for people.
For all the moving through time, this book actually didn't spare much time for historical detail or the kind of almost fetishistic description of daily life in other periods that many historic novelists indulge in (in a good way). And since the characters were, also, not very detailed, the bulk of the book was pure plot. People moving from point a to b and desiring c or d then getting it or not.
There was a disturbing repetition in the way women were described — all were remarkably "beautiful" and about half were labeled with stereotypical feisty redhead epithets. There were also a lot of instances people hooking up without knowing each other, in every era, on account of some ineffable mystical attraction. Seemed like a bit of cop out to avoid describing why characters felt things, or what, in detail, they felt.
In all, the writing isn't terrible, and I sure a careful analysis would surface the interconnections of themes and characters in a way that might make it all more meaningful. But it didn't really catch me because it reads like superficial and plot-driven mythology.
Many of the stories felt unfinished, or finished insignificantly and I kept waiting for ends to be tied up, or at least revisited. In fact, for about the first third of the book I was sure it would snap out of the superficial mode and start to follow particular characters more deeply, using the first third as some meaningful backstory. But no, the whole thing went on in the same vein.
The idea of places and objects that show up again and again through time, relating to different characters in different eras is pretty fascinating, but I think, because the characters were so under-developed, and one didn't care that much about any one in particular, it was hard to fully appreciate the weighty significance as many encountered the recurrent tropes.
I admit, the use of one house, described through time from being a town founder's first, hard-won abode in the 18th century to its tenancy by later relations and its final position as the town historical museum in the modern era did strike a chord with me. Perhaps because I find house histories so fascinating, or because I've spent a lot of time in historical houses which are no longer in private hands (especially as a docent in a house museum). Somehow, this story made it more real to me that these museums were once, real, vital, every day places for people.
For all the moving through time, this book actually didn't spare much time for historical detail or the kind of almost fetishistic description of daily life in other periods that many historic novelists indulge in (in a good way). And since the characters were, also, not very detailed, the bulk of the book was pure plot. People moving from point a to b and desiring c or d then getting it or not.
There was a disturbing repetition in the way women were described — all were remarkably "beautiful" and about half were labeled with stereotypical feisty redhead epithets. There were also a lot of instances people hooking up without knowing each other, in every era, on account of some ineffable mystical attraction. Seemed like a bit of cop out to avoid describing why characters felt things, or what, in detail, they felt.
In all, the writing isn't terrible, and I sure a careful analysis would surface the interconnections of themes and characters in a way that might make it all more meaningful. But it didn't really catch me because it reads like superficial and plot-driven mythology.
dnf-shelf
October 7, 2019Did not finish: DNF @ 17%
It's always so sad to DNF a book by one of your favorite authors... But I just couldn't get into this one at all. I've been trying to make myself read it since July, and it's October. Let's face it, it's just not working out.
I think the reason I couldn't get into it is the same reason I find it hard to read short stories - I get used to the character, and bam - they're gone. This was just like that. Okay, so maybe she does weave a bigger tale about the whole town through the characters, but I'm not okay with 5% of the book per character, and then never seeing them again. It's too little. I can't get invested at all.
It's always so sad to DNF a book by one of your favorite authors... But I just couldn't get into this one at all. I've been trying to make myself read it since July, and it's October. Let's face it, it's just not working out.
I think the reason I couldn't get into it is the same reason I find it hard to read short stories - I get used to the character, and bam - they're gone. This was just like that. Okay, so maybe she does weave a bigger tale about the whole town through the characters, but I'm not okay with 5% of the book per character, and then never seeing them again. It's too little. I can't get invested at all.
March 3, 2024
So many great stories that merged for the main level. I liked many of the characters and wished they had more extended forays in this world.
I loved the many dogs that were gifted.
All the tales are told chronologically and return to the Red Garden in one way or another. I also loved the animal connection with different creatures.
Other slower-paced stories failed to grasp my attention, and I was left wanting with the final story that ended the book.
Overall, it was a great book to read once. Solid 3-3.5 Stars
I loved the many dogs that were gifted.
All the tales are told chronologically and return to the Red Garden in one way or another. I also loved the animal connection with different creatures.
Other slower-paced stories failed to grasp my attention, and I was left wanting with the final story that ended the book.
Overall, it was a great book to read once. Solid 3-3.5 Stars
June 22, 2014
Alice Hoffman has written many books, but The Red Garden is the first one that I've read. I don't know how it compares to the rest of them, but I enjoyed it as my introduction to her work.
The Red Garden is a novel broken into seven short stories, all concerned with the same town of Blackwell in rural Massachusetts. The opening story, The Bear House, describes the arrival of the first settlers to the uninhabited wilderness and the set up of a first community, Bearsville in 1750 - named so after the many bears who roamed these woods for centuries before man ever set foot in them. The community changed its name to Blackwell in 1786, and the subsequent stories are glimpses from 200 years of its history, concluding somewhere at the end of the 20th century.
This is an interesting idea which is worth exploring and writing about. While the first story introduces a set of characters - of particular importance is young Hallie, an English woman who first explores the wilderness somewhere in the Berkshires - but because of decade-long gaps only some of them will make a return appearance in other stories, and often not in person: they'd be someone's mother, father or nephew, or a person about whom stories are told, and who's not there in person (Andrea Barrett uses a similar technique in her stories, and is very underrated). The town where their story is set is the only constant character in the story - it's a place where they came to pursue their dreams, or long to get away from, or simply another stop on their road. The stories move the town in a freshly independent country through a civil war, the Great Depression and both World Wars to the current times. It's a good way to illustrate historical change - what was once a vital and energetic place will someday be only a memorial to those times.
Still, the book is not without its flaws. One of them isn't really a flaw - I was expecting The Re Garden to be much more fantastical than it actually was. It's not really a fantasy novel, as the only real element which can be even considered as such appears in the story of the fisherman and his wife - and even that is debatable. Second, Alice Hoffman is bound on showing the history and changes of Blackwell that she does take a few shortcuts with its people - women are invariably beautiful, feisty and heroic; people meet and fall in love at first sight once too often. The fragmented short histories is not a good medium to give much depth to the characters, whose plights and heroism - even though moving and well-written - tend to be more plot-driven than character-driven, as the focus on characters is perpetually shifted from one to another after each story.
It isn't to say that The Red Garden is a bad book - far from it - it's a good piece of casual storytelling, which is something often abandoned in favor of experimental methods which don't always strike a chord with me. Alice Hoffman can turn a phrase and capture attention, and I doubt most readers would truly regret the moments they'd spent with The Red Garden - a book which would go well in in the warmth of a home during winter, with tea and biscuits and a comfortable chair.
The Red Garden is a novel broken into seven short stories, all concerned with the same town of Blackwell in rural Massachusetts. The opening story, The Bear House, describes the arrival of the first settlers to the uninhabited wilderness and the set up of a first community, Bearsville in 1750 - named so after the many bears who roamed these woods for centuries before man ever set foot in them. The community changed its name to Blackwell in 1786, and the subsequent stories are glimpses from 200 years of its history, concluding somewhere at the end of the 20th century.
This is an interesting idea which is worth exploring and writing about. While the first story introduces a set of characters - of particular importance is young Hallie, an English woman who first explores the wilderness somewhere in the Berkshires - but because of decade-long gaps only some of them will make a return appearance in other stories, and often not in person: they'd be someone's mother, father or nephew, or a person about whom stories are told, and who's not there in person (Andrea Barrett uses a similar technique in her stories, and is very underrated). The town where their story is set is the only constant character in the story - it's a place where they came to pursue their dreams, or long to get away from, or simply another stop on their road. The stories move the town in a freshly independent country through a civil war, the Great Depression and both World Wars to the current times. It's a good way to illustrate historical change - what was once a vital and energetic place will someday be only a memorial to those times.
Still, the book is not without its flaws. One of them isn't really a flaw - I was expecting The Re Garden to be much more fantastical than it actually was. It's not really a fantasy novel, as the only real element which can be even considered as such appears in the story of the fisherman and his wife - and even that is debatable. Second, Alice Hoffman is bound on showing the history and changes of Blackwell that she does take a few shortcuts with its people - women are invariably beautiful, feisty and heroic; people meet and fall in love at first sight once too often. The fragmented short histories is not a good medium to give much depth to the characters, whose plights and heroism - even though moving and well-written - tend to be more plot-driven than character-driven, as the focus on characters is perpetually shifted from one to another after each story.
It isn't to say that The Red Garden is a bad book - far from it - it's a good piece of casual storytelling, which is something often abandoned in favor of experimental methods which don't always strike a chord with me. Alice Hoffman can turn a phrase and capture attention, and I doubt most readers would truly regret the moments they'd spent with The Red Garden - a book which would go well in in the warmth of a home during winter, with tea and biscuits and a comfortable chair.
December 17, 2022
Ms. Hoffman's, "The Red Garden," is a series of short stories that span three hundred years, all connected, in one way or other, to the charming, mystical town of Blackwell, Massachusetts.
The town, foundered in 1750, by a courageous and brave woman, Hallie Brady, who was originally from England and had no fear of bears or deadly blizzards and passed over the treacherous Hightop Mountain with her companions and landed on the other side, disconnected from the rest of Massachusetts by the mountain, and found the town of Blackwell...which was originally named Bearsville.
The founding of Blackwell is the first story in the collection and the next thirteen stories, which take place in sequential order, ends at just about the turn of twenty-first century. The stories are seamlessly weaved together, with recurrent characters and descendants of these characters, leaving the reader in awe and hoping there was no end to the stories.
Ms. Hoffman is a prolific writer and I have read a lot of her books, and never once was I even the least bit dissatisfied with any of her novels. She possesses an acute knowledge of history and animal behavior and her characters are usually nothing short of fascinating. She, like the wonderful Ann Patchett, has a beautifully crafted writing style that young, aspiring writers could learn quite a bit from. "The Red Garden," is very simply another stunning piece of writing from this superbly gifted writer.
The town, foundered in 1750, by a courageous and brave woman, Hallie Brady, who was originally from England and had no fear of bears or deadly blizzards and passed over the treacherous Hightop Mountain with her companions and landed on the other side, disconnected from the rest of Massachusetts by the mountain, and found the town of Blackwell...which was originally named Bearsville.
The founding of Blackwell is the first story in the collection and the next thirteen stories, which take place in sequential order, ends at just about the turn of twenty-first century. The stories are seamlessly weaved together, with recurrent characters and descendants of these characters, leaving the reader in awe and hoping there was no end to the stories.
Ms. Hoffman is a prolific writer and I have read a lot of her books, and never once was I even the least bit dissatisfied with any of her novels. She possesses an acute knowledge of history and animal behavior and her characters are usually nothing short of fascinating. She, like the wonderful Ann Patchett, has a beautifully crafted writing style that young, aspiring writers could learn quite a bit from. "The Red Garden," is very simply another stunning piece of writing from this superbly gifted writer.
August 18, 2011
Another absolutely lovely book by Alice Hoffman. I cannot think of a fiction writer who is better at describing the outdoors. She makes me see the sunlight filtering through the trees, leaving honey-colored splotches on the ground. I can hear the locusts, smell the lilacs and feel the moss between my toes. A year from now I won't be able to remember a thing about this book other than the fact that reading it made me feel quite pleased with the universe.
May 8, 2011
In general, I dislike magical realism, but I love the brand of magical realism written by Alice Hoffman. I like that fact that Hoffman isn’t a “showy” writer, that she doesn’t depend on plots that carry the reader along at breakneck speed or, despite her fondness for magical realism, gimmicks. Alice Hoffman is, instead, a restrained writer, a gentle and quiet writer, and one who leaves the stylistic pyrotechnics to others. However, she’s a masterful storyteller and a gifted author.
Hoffman’s latest book, The Red Garden, is a collection of fourteen linked short stories that tell the history of a fictional town, Blackwell, Massachusetts, deep in the Berkshires, from its founding in 1750 to the late 20th century.
Blackwell is a very small town, and so the same families keep appearing in the linked stories – the Motts, the Patridges, the Starrs, and the Jacobs. These people marry and live in the shadow of Hightop Mountain, and these same people pass down Blackwell’s folktales and legends from one generation to another.
Blackwell was first known as Bearsville due to the large population of bears dotting Hightop Mountain. The opening story, “The Bear’s House,” revolves around a plucky young woman named Hallie Brady, who, along with three other families, founded Blackwell. Hallie was an orphan from England, who began working at a hatmaker’s at the age of eleven. At seventeen, she married and joined her forty-year-old husband and three other families on an expedition to western Massachusetts. The others were discouraged by the snow, the cold, the bears, and the lack of food. (The men seem to have lacked basic hunting and survival skills.) Hallie, however, didn’t let anything deter her. As Hoffman writes:
She had come all the way from England and she didn't intend to die her first winter out, not on the western side of this high dark mountain.
Determined not to turn back, Hallie smashes the ice of a frozen river and fishes out eels for a stew, builds traps for rabbits, and milks a hibernating bear.
And Hallie loved “her” bear. Even after the town was established she often “gazed out the window, as if there was someplace she wanted to be, some other life that was more worth living.”
In fact, as the book progresses, the reader sees that almost all of the women in Blackwell long for something that’s just out of their reach. Some of these women, like Hallie, pine for the wild. Others long for a life of love, but die young and alone, instead. Some stay in town, while others venture away. All, however, seemed touched by regret. As one character says at the end of her story, “I already knew I would never get what I wanted."
It’s Hallie Brady, the “first lady” of Blackwell who introduces many of the themes and motifs that run through this collection of stories: a courageous young woman, who seems to find love only in the most surprising of places; an intense but unstable relationship between humans and the natural world in which they live; a legacy of sorrow and loss; a definite undercurrent of magic and mystery. And it’s Hallie who plants the garden of the book’s title in the rich, red soil that causes every plant that grows there to be vibrant and alive with the color red.
Although it’s women who are featured in this book (this is Alice Hoffman; woman are naturally going to be featured), the men play a part as well, and like the women, the men are subject to the magic that constantly envelops Blackwell.
Ghosts surface again and again in this book, in almost every story, and since their stories are rooted in the actual history of Blackwell, they remind the reader that stories usually outlive their readers and that the division between the “real” world and the world beyond is a very thin one.
Every story is linked to and enriched by the stories that came before it. And real, historical figures visit Blackwell. At one point, Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman wanders into Blackwell and plants the “Tree of Life,” an apple tree that will sustain all of the town, and in doing so, he saves a life. One of my favorite poets, Emily Dickinson, stumbles into Blackwell from Mount Holyoke College, with her dog, Carlos. She only stays a few days, but when she leaves, she’s forever changed.
Other prominent characters are the characters we get to know in the pages of this dreamy, fabulist book. There’s the little girl who drowns in the Eel River, but whose ghost hovers over Blackwell and its inhabitants. “The Monster of Blackwell” revolves around Matthew James, a young man so “exceedingly ugly, so ugly he couldn’t look at himself,” a young man with a hideous deformity, a deformity so severe that he flees to the solitude of Hightop Mountain, only to fall in love with, and write poetry to, Kate Partridge, a beautiful woman in the village, the daughter of one of Blackwell’s founding fathers. We know from the outset that their romance is either going to have a happy ending or it’s going to be bittersweet, and when that ending does come, it seems as inevitable as the setting of the sun or the dawn of a new day.
The common thread running through all these stories is the red garden, of course, a garden where all the plants bloom red, where passions run high and bones lie buried, some of them in secret. Scarlet amaranth and crimson larkspur grow wild in Blackwell; many of the town’s inhabitant’s have red hair and freckles, and the mercurial temper that’s legendary with such coloring. Ava Cooper’s very best cake – the Apology Cake – is, of course, red velvet. When anyone turns on the TV at the “Jack Straw Bar and Grill” in the center of town, it’s the Red Sox who are on. And the “Tree of Life,” planted by the above mentioned Johnny Appleseed in the center of town, drops apples called “Look-No-Furthers,” a gentle reminder to all who pick the fruit that redder apples are nowhere to be found.
The strongest pieces in the book are the stories in which a strong current of magical realism is present as it is in “The Fisherman’s Wife," a story about a strange woman, with black hair so long she’d step on it if she didn’t keep it pinned up. The wife of a fisherman who’s caught more than one million eels, this odd woman goes door-to-door in Blackwell until something very extraordinary happens, but something that in Blackwell, barely causes the inhabitants to bat an eyelash.
Just as in a novel, there is a narrative arc in The Red Garden, but it’s so subtly and gently built, so feather-light, that a casual reader could easily miss it. I find this “feather-lightness” to be true of almost all of Alice Hoffman’s work. If she were any other author, it would be a fault, however her writing is so different from that of others, it’s so much “her own,” that what would be a fault in anyone else, is beautiful in Hoffman’s work. Her “gently layered themes” have come to be her trademark. In fact, when I think of Alice Hoffman, it’s the word, “gentle” that first comes to my mind. Her themes don’t become apparent until they are repeated over and over and over again, in subtly different ways.
As always, Hoffman conveys her extraordinary events in spare, matter-of-fact prose, but sometimes we come upon a gem that really touches us deeply. In this book we hear laughter shine “through the darkness, brighter than any light;” we see people falling in love “like a stone dropped into a river;” we watch a toddler “hurtle into each day.” It’s fresh and it’s beautiful and it’s a joy to read.
Just as she sometimes pulls real, historical personages into these stories, Hoffman has set the stories against real, historical events – the Civil War, the Depression, World War II – however, sometimes all of this seems curiously out-of-place. There’s the tale of Ben Levy, a Jewish graduate of Yale in the 1930s. Very few Jews attended Ivy League schools in the 1930s. Then there’s the fact that while Hoffman uses the Civil War as a backdrop, she never once mentions slavery. This might bother some people, but I thought it added to the enchantment of the book. Blackwell wasn’t so isolated from the rest of the world that its inhabitants didn’t know what was going on, but it was isolated enough not to be too impacted by them.
In “The Fisherman’s Wife,” a character says, “A story can still entrance people even while the world is falling apart.”
If it’s Alice Hoffman who’s telling the tale, that, of course, is true.
5/5
Recommended: Definitely to fans of Alice Hoffman and to those who like fairy tales or magical realism. Even if you’re like me, and generally like only reality-based fiction, you might find something to love in these gentle, beautiful stories and enjoy the change of pace.
You can read my book reviews, writing tips, etc. at literarycornercafe.blogspot.com
Hoffman’s latest book, The Red Garden, is a collection of fourteen linked short stories that tell the history of a fictional town, Blackwell, Massachusetts, deep in the Berkshires, from its founding in 1750 to the late 20th century.
Blackwell is a very small town, and so the same families keep appearing in the linked stories – the Motts, the Patridges, the Starrs, and the Jacobs. These people marry and live in the shadow of Hightop Mountain, and these same people pass down Blackwell’s folktales and legends from one generation to another.
Blackwell was first known as Bearsville due to the large population of bears dotting Hightop Mountain. The opening story, “The Bear’s House,” revolves around a plucky young woman named Hallie Brady, who, along with three other families, founded Blackwell. Hallie was an orphan from England, who began working at a hatmaker’s at the age of eleven. At seventeen, she married and joined her forty-year-old husband and three other families on an expedition to western Massachusetts. The others were discouraged by the snow, the cold, the bears, and the lack of food. (The men seem to have lacked basic hunting and survival skills.) Hallie, however, didn’t let anything deter her. As Hoffman writes:
She had come all the way from England and she didn't intend to die her first winter out, not on the western side of this high dark mountain.
Determined not to turn back, Hallie smashes the ice of a frozen river and fishes out eels for a stew, builds traps for rabbits, and milks a hibernating bear.
And Hallie loved “her” bear. Even after the town was established she often “gazed out the window, as if there was someplace she wanted to be, some other life that was more worth living.”
In fact, as the book progresses, the reader sees that almost all of the women in Blackwell long for something that’s just out of their reach. Some of these women, like Hallie, pine for the wild. Others long for a life of love, but die young and alone, instead. Some stay in town, while others venture away. All, however, seemed touched by regret. As one character says at the end of her story, “I already knew I would never get what I wanted."
It’s Hallie Brady, the “first lady” of Blackwell who introduces many of the themes and motifs that run through this collection of stories: a courageous young woman, who seems to find love only in the most surprising of places; an intense but unstable relationship between humans and the natural world in which they live; a legacy of sorrow and loss; a definite undercurrent of magic and mystery. And it’s Hallie who plants the garden of the book’s title in the rich, red soil that causes every plant that grows there to be vibrant and alive with the color red.
Although it’s women who are featured in this book (this is Alice Hoffman; woman are naturally going to be featured), the men play a part as well, and like the women, the men are subject to the magic that constantly envelops Blackwell.
Ghosts surface again and again in this book, in almost every story, and since their stories are rooted in the actual history of Blackwell, they remind the reader that stories usually outlive their readers and that the division between the “real” world and the world beyond is a very thin one.
Every story is linked to and enriched by the stories that came before it. And real, historical figures visit Blackwell. At one point, Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman wanders into Blackwell and plants the “Tree of Life,” an apple tree that will sustain all of the town, and in doing so, he saves a life. One of my favorite poets, Emily Dickinson, stumbles into Blackwell from Mount Holyoke College, with her dog, Carlos. She only stays a few days, but when she leaves, she’s forever changed.
Other prominent characters are the characters we get to know in the pages of this dreamy, fabulist book. There’s the little girl who drowns in the Eel River, but whose ghost hovers over Blackwell and its inhabitants. “The Monster of Blackwell” revolves around Matthew James, a young man so “exceedingly ugly, so ugly he couldn’t look at himself,” a young man with a hideous deformity, a deformity so severe that he flees to the solitude of Hightop Mountain, only to fall in love with, and write poetry to, Kate Partridge, a beautiful woman in the village, the daughter of one of Blackwell’s founding fathers. We know from the outset that their romance is either going to have a happy ending or it’s going to be bittersweet, and when that ending does come, it seems as inevitable as the setting of the sun or the dawn of a new day.
The common thread running through all these stories is the red garden, of course, a garden where all the plants bloom red, where passions run high and bones lie buried, some of them in secret. Scarlet amaranth and crimson larkspur grow wild in Blackwell; many of the town’s inhabitant’s have red hair and freckles, and the mercurial temper that’s legendary with such coloring. Ava Cooper’s very best cake – the Apology Cake – is, of course, red velvet. When anyone turns on the TV at the “Jack Straw Bar and Grill” in the center of town, it’s the Red Sox who are on. And the “Tree of Life,” planted by the above mentioned Johnny Appleseed in the center of town, drops apples called “Look-No-Furthers,” a gentle reminder to all who pick the fruit that redder apples are nowhere to be found.
The strongest pieces in the book are the stories in which a strong current of magical realism is present as it is in “The Fisherman’s Wife," a story about a strange woman, with black hair so long she’d step on it if she didn’t keep it pinned up. The wife of a fisherman who’s caught more than one million eels, this odd woman goes door-to-door in Blackwell until something very extraordinary happens, but something that in Blackwell, barely causes the inhabitants to bat an eyelash.
Just as in a novel, there is a narrative arc in The Red Garden, but it’s so subtly and gently built, so feather-light, that a casual reader could easily miss it. I find this “feather-lightness” to be true of almost all of Alice Hoffman’s work. If she were any other author, it would be a fault, however her writing is so different from that of others, it’s so much “her own,” that what would be a fault in anyone else, is beautiful in Hoffman’s work. Her “gently layered themes” have come to be her trademark. In fact, when I think of Alice Hoffman, it’s the word, “gentle” that first comes to my mind. Her themes don’t become apparent until they are repeated over and over and over again, in subtly different ways.
As always, Hoffman conveys her extraordinary events in spare, matter-of-fact prose, but sometimes we come upon a gem that really touches us deeply. In this book we hear laughter shine “through the darkness, brighter than any light;” we see people falling in love “like a stone dropped into a river;” we watch a toddler “hurtle into each day.” It’s fresh and it’s beautiful and it’s a joy to read.
Just as she sometimes pulls real, historical personages into these stories, Hoffman has set the stories against real, historical events – the Civil War, the Depression, World War II – however, sometimes all of this seems curiously out-of-place. There’s the tale of Ben Levy, a Jewish graduate of Yale in the 1930s. Very few Jews attended Ivy League schools in the 1930s. Then there’s the fact that while Hoffman uses the Civil War as a backdrop, she never once mentions slavery. This might bother some people, but I thought it added to the enchantment of the book. Blackwell wasn’t so isolated from the rest of the world that its inhabitants didn’t know what was going on, but it was isolated enough not to be too impacted by them.
In “The Fisherman’s Wife,” a character says, “A story can still entrance people even while the world is falling apart.”
If it’s Alice Hoffman who’s telling the tale, that, of course, is true.
5/5
Recommended: Definitely to fans of Alice Hoffman and to those who like fairy tales or magical realism. Even if you’re like me, and generally like only reality-based fiction, you might find something to love in these gentle, beautiful stories and enjoy the change of pace.
You can read my book reviews, writing tips, etc. at literarycornercafe.blogspot.com
February 27, 2011
I wasn't as enthralled with the "magic" of the Red Garden as most other reviewers. Some of the stories were a lot of fun to read, others just dragged on. I never quite bought into the mystery of the garden, its red soil, and its inability to grow anything that wasn't red.
The story where the "paleontologist" from Harvard comes out was by far the worst. Hoffman confused paleontology with archaeology and should have done a little research before writing the nonsense she wrote. I went to graduate school for archaeology so I feel the need to rant, based on my experience, which should have been roughly comparable to that of the grad student sent out in the book. Based on a bone fragment, the researcher would have known he wasn't dealing with a fossil and, most likely, that it was mammalian. Fossils don't look like non-fossilized bones and mammal bones don't look like reptilian or avian bones. Second, he would have been able to determine species very quickly - it wasn't necessary to find the skull or see an articulated specimen. Many bear bones look a lot like human bones so that could have been the red herring for awhile.
The story where the "paleontologist" from Harvard comes out was by far the worst. Hoffman confused paleontology with archaeology and should have done a little research before writing the nonsense she wrote. I went to graduate school for archaeology so I feel the need to rant, based on my experience, which should have been roughly comparable to that of the grad student sent out in the book. Based on a bone fragment, the researcher would have known he wasn't dealing with a fossil and, most likely, that it was mammalian. Fossils don't look like non-fossilized bones and mammal bones don't look like reptilian or avian bones. Second, he would have been able to determine species very quickly - it wasn't necessary to find the skull or see an articulated specimen. Many bear bones look a lot like human bones so that could have been the red herring for awhile.
April 10, 2013
Well, normally I like Alice Hoffman, but I did not like this book. It covers the time period from 1750 to present. It is about a small, fictional town somewhere in Massachusetts, founded in 1750. And each entry (there are 14 of them) involves someone a decade later who was related somehow to the person in the entry before them. I found it boring...and it was hard to keep track of how each person was related to the previous people...or perhaps because I was not very interested, I neglected to keep track.
Each protagonist in each entry was odd or did odd things or was considered to be unusual to the other townspeople. And sometimes odd events happened to these protagonists.
So this book was odd and boring. And disjointed. And none of the characters stayed with me once I moved onto the next character....
And then ending just ends. There is really no point.
As you can tell, I did not like this book.
I'd like to hear from anyone who enjoyed this book.
Each protagonist in each entry was odd or did odd things or was considered to be unusual to the other townspeople. And sometimes odd events happened to these protagonists.
So this book was odd and boring. And disjointed. And none of the characters stayed with me once I moved onto the next character....
And then ending just ends. There is really no point.
As you can tell, I did not like this book.
I'd like to hear from anyone who enjoyed this book.
November 27, 2013
Magical book taking place in Blackwell, Massachusetts. Starts back in the 1700s when the town was first founded and tells the stories within the town for the next 300 years. Filled with magic, love, loss, bears, and an apparition.
It centers around Hallie Brady and her blood red garden that transpires into the next generation and story...
I devoured each chapter as the narrator took me on a journey of Blackwell, and I learned about the different family lines and how they ended up crossing and crossing again over the years.
My favorite was the story of the Fisherman's wife, who was rumored to be a mermaid, and the story of the Monster and his devotion to Kate Partridge. Too many lines to quote and fall in love with.
Alice Hoffman has a knack for writing and a gift with her words. I really enjoyed this one, and will have to check out more by this author.
It centers around Hallie Brady and her blood red garden that transpires into the next generation and story...
I devoured each chapter as the narrator took me on a journey of Blackwell, and I learned about the different family lines and how they ended up crossing and crossing again over the years.
My favorite was the story of the Fisherman's wife, who was rumored to be a mermaid, and the story of the Monster and his devotion to Kate Partridge. Too many lines to quote and fall in love with.
Alice Hoffman has a knack for writing and a gift with her words. I really enjoyed this one, and will have to check out more by this author.
October 11, 2014
I'm new to this author but haven't been disappointed yet. This is a series of short stories spanning around 250 years covering the people of Blackwell. The only criticism I would have would be some stories stopped short for me. Thus being "short stories". I'm a detail person so I wanted to know the whys and hows of every story. Sometimes it left you hanging to gleam from it what you will. Very well written! I'm a Hoffman fan as of a few weeks ago. I look forward to more of her tales.
December 4, 2017
This book felt disconnected to me, three hundred years is a bit too long to cover in a book, where the storylines get lost on the way.
I really liked the first story. I loved Hallie Brady. She was brave, strong and amazing. Hallie went out on her own. She tramped over the frozen marshes, ignoring the patches of briars. When she got to the riverside, she took a rock and smashed through the skim of ice over the water. Then with her bare hands she reached into the blackness and collected a potful of eels for a stew. They wriggled and fought, the way eels do, but because of the cold they were in a half sleep and Hallie easily won the fight. She had come all the way from England and she didn’t intend to die her first winter out, not on the western side of this high dark mountain.
I wish more of the book was more about her, but the book quickly moves from one year to the next, one story to the next, one character to the next, and loses its charm.
In general, I am not much into short stories, I didn't like Tenth of December by George Saunders, Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories by Ron Rash, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, or even Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin.
There are major exceptions though. It is impossible in my opinion not to love and admire the outstanding Alice Munro (almost all of her books are 5 stars), and getting closest to her is Jhumpa Lahiri (that is great in full length novel as well as short stories).
Hoffman has an outstanding writing style, but it just didn't work for me here. Unfortunately, the book is extremely un-engaging. 2 stars.
I really liked the first story. I loved Hallie Brady. She was brave, strong and amazing. Hallie went out on her own. She tramped over the frozen marshes, ignoring the patches of briars. When she got to the riverside, she took a rock and smashed through the skim of ice over the water. Then with her bare hands she reached into the blackness and collected a potful of eels for a stew. They wriggled and fought, the way eels do, but because of the cold they were in a half sleep and Hallie easily won the fight. She had come all the way from England and she didn’t intend to die her first winter out, not on the western side of this high dark mountain.
I wish more of the book was more about her, but the book quickly moves from one year to the next, one story to the next, one character to the next, and loses its charm.
In general, I am not much into short stories, I didn't like Tenth of December by George Saunders, Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories by Ron Rash, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, or even Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin.
There are major exceptions though. It is impossible in my opinion not to love and admire the outstanding Alice Munro (almost all of her books are 5 stars), and getting closest to her is Jhumpa Lahiri (that is great in full length novel as well as short stories).
Hoffman has an outstanding writing style, but it just didn't work for me here. Unfortunately, the book is extremely un-engaging. 2 stars.
February 11, 2011
This novel is not a winner for Hoffman. The main character is the town of Blackwell and it's founding family. Hoffman takes us through about two centuries of the family, with stories of the family members. The problem with the novel is the stories are to fragmented. Hoffman divides the chapters into time periods, and gives the reader what amount to vingettes of family members in this periods. When she moves to the next chapter and next time period it is hard to tell how the characters in the current chapter relate to the characters in the chapter before. Frequently the link does not appear to halfway through a chapter making the novel very fragmented.
As a reader I was left highly unsatisfied because just as I begun to like the characters in one chapter Hoffman would abandon them for a new group in the next chapter. Hoffman's strength as a write is her character development and in this novel where she switches characters almost every chapter takes away from that. Having a town as a main character in this novel does not work either, since Hoffman does not give the reader enough reason to care about the town. It seems like every other small Massachuessets town, with a few charming details but on the whole just not an interesting town.
This novel is a complete bust. The few characters that Hoffman takes the time to develop are, as is true of many Hoffman characters, are a pleasure to read about. However since Hoffman abandons these characters after a chapter or two I was left with an unsatisfied feeling when if finished reading this one.
As a reader I was left highly unsatisfied because just as I begun to like the characters in one chapter Hoffman would abandon them for a new group in the next chapter. Hoffman's strength as a write is her character development and in this novel where she switches characters almost every chapter takes away from that. Having a town as a main character in this novel does not work either, since Hoffman does not give the reader enough reason to care about the town. It seems like every other small Massachuessets town, with a few charming details but on the whole just not an interesting town.
This novel is a complete bust. The few characters that Hoffman takes the time to develop are, as is true of many Hoffman characters, are a pleasure to read about. However since Hoffman abandons these characters after a chapter or two I was left with an unsatisfied feeling when if finished reading this one.
February 4, 2011
From a summary: The Red Garden introduces us to the luminous and haunting world of Blackwell, Massachusetts. Hoffman offers a transforming glimpse of small-town America, presenting us with some three hundred years of passion, dark secrets, loyalty, and redemption in a web of tales.
I haven't read an Alice Hoffman book for a few years, but I was intrigued by this one right from the first page. There's something comforting about following families over a three hundred year period -- especially when they all return to their roots in Blackwell, MA. Hoffman included historical events such as the Civil War, the Influenza Epidemic of 1916 and World War II. It was her storytelling, though, that had me hooked throughout the book. I liked the characters, flaws and all. This book was a nice change of pace.
I haven't read an Alice Hoffman book for a few years, but I was intrigued by this one right from the first page. There's something comforting about following families over a three hundred year period -- especially when they all return to their roots in Blackwell, MA. Hoffman included historical events such as the Civil War, the Influenza Epidemic of 1916 and World War II. It was her storytelling, though, that had me hooked throughout the book. I liked the characters, flaws and all. This book was a nice change of pace.
February 5, 2017
I never learn. Every time I see a Hoffman book I am drawn to it. Even though I invariably did NOT enjoy the last one, I always think THIS time I will. This was a collection of short stories that all take place in the same town over the course of 150 years or so. That’s the only thread. The characters are vaguely related, but there is no common thread other than the location.
I don’t need a linear story, what I do need is a story. Any story. With very few exceptions, these were about nothing. They were descriptions of a series of events that went nowhere. I am very disappointed and may have finally learned NOT to pick up the next Hoffman I see.
I don’t need a linear story, what I do need is a story. Any story. With very few exceptions, these were about nothing. They were descriptions of a series of events that went nowhere. I am very disappointed and may have finally learned NOT to pick up the next Hoffman I see.
February 11, 2021
📚 Hello Book Friends! I am a huge fan of Alice Hoffman’s books. Her writing is beautiful and riveting. THE RED GARDEN has been on my TBR shelf for a while and picked it up over the weekend. It is the journey of generations after generations of people in one family and one town called Blackwell, located in Massachusetts. The story starts at the town foundation in 1750 by Hallie Brady and travels through time to modern days. It documents the birth and death of many, stories of ghosts, stories of bears, and stories of love. Although the concept of this book was quite unique, it got a bit repetitive after a while. It is nonetheless a good read.
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January 25, 2012
What an enchanting book! I loved it from the first chapter, which tells the story of how a group of settlers got stranded during winter of 1750 in Massachusetts, and they ended up forming a town. There was a heroine, Hallie Brady, who saved the settlers from starvation with help from a bear, and her life became folklore that was handed down through the generations.
But it wasn't until the second or third chapter that I realized what Hoffman had done -- she covered 250 years of history of the town, each section telling the tale of a different generation. Characters who are children in one story pop up in another one as adults, their memories of the town adding to the lore. (The writer in me wishes I could peek at Hoffman's diagrams and sketches. She must have had to make several family trees and timelines in order to properly plan the book and keep all of the lineages straight.)
As a reader, I enjoyed knowing the so-called truth of the stories when a character referred to the town lore or didn't know the history. For example, the original heroine, Hallie, hated her husband and wished he were dead, so she named everything Dead Husband's River or Dead Husband's Meadow. In later generations, it got shortened to just "Band's Meadow," which made me smile every time it was referenced. I also liked knowing the true story behind the broken rifle that belonged to one of the original settlers and was still hanging on the wall of the ancestral home 200 years later.
There is some magic in the book, including the mysterious Red Garden of the title, which only grows things that are red. As with the history of any town, some stories are better than others (I could have done without the tale of the woman turning into an eel, for example) but overall, this was a very enjoyable read. I appreciated Hoffman's breadth of storytelling -- so many lives in 250 years! Each of them with their own hopes and plans and sorrows and adventures, and, of course, love.
But it wasn't until the second or third chapter that I realized what Hoffman had done -- she covered 250 years of history of the town, each section telling the tale of a different generation. Characters who are children in one story pop up in another one as adults, their memories of the town adding to the lore. (The writer in me wishes I could peek at Hoffman's diagrams and sketches. She must have had to make several family trees and timelines in order to properly plan the book and keep all of the lineages straight.)
As a reader, I enjoyed knowing the so-called truth of the stories when a character referred to the town lore or didn't know the history. For example, the original heroine, Hallie, hated her husband and wished he were dead, so she named everything Dead Husband's River or Dead Husband's Meadow. In later generations, it got shortened to just "Band's Meadow," which made me smile every time it was referenced. I also liked knowing the true story behind the broken rifle that belonged to one of the original settlers and was still hanging on the wall of the ancestral home 200 years later.
There is some magic in the book, including the mysterious Red Garden of the title, which only grows things that are red. As with the history of any town, some stories are better than others (I could have done without the tale of the woman turning into an eel, for example) but overall, this was a very enjoyable read. I appreciated Hoffman's breadth of storytelling -- so many lives in 250 years! Each of them with their own hopes and plans and sorrows and adventures, and, of course, love.
February 2, 2011
The things I like most in Alice Hoffman's books are: gardens, sisters, the effects and affects of ancestors on later characters, old houses, and history/nostalgia.
This book has them all, so of course I liked this book.
It evokes moments from many of her other stories - a woman inadvertantly forming the path her family will take for decades to come (Practical Magic), the life and death of gardens with specific emphasis on tomatoes (The Story Sisters), following lives to create the full story (The Third Angel), etc. While I always think this will bother me, it never does. In fact, I relish those tugs on strings used elsewhere.
The Red Garden, named for one of the constants in the book (it could have as easily been called Bears or The First Door or The Eel River), is a compilation of stories following the life of a small Massachussetts town from it's accidental founding to the current goings-ons of the founding families' descendants. Some stories are hopeful, some are heart-breaking, most are just stories of things that happened to people. It feels like history come to life and I wish my town's history could be told in a similar fashion.
This book has them all, so of course I liked this book.
It evokes moments from many of her other stories - a woman inadvertantly forming the path her family will take for decades to come (Practical Magic), the life and death of gardens with specific emphasis on tomatoes (The Story Sisters), following lives to create the full story (The Third Angel), etc. While I always think this will bother me, it never does. In fact, I relish those tugs on strings used elsewhere.
The Red Garden, named for one of the constants in the book (it could have as easily been called Bears or The First Door or The Eel River), is a compilation of stories following the life of a small Massachussetts town from it's accidental founding to the current goings-ons of the founding families' descendants. Some stories are hopeful, some are heart-breaking, most are just stories of things that happened to people. It feels like history come to life and I wish my town's history could be told in a similar fashion.
February 10, 2011
Not up to Alice Hoffman's usual standards. The idea was intriguing - telling the story of the town through a couple of centuries through the eyes of different residents. The residents are all related in one way or another and each short story ties the current resident back to pioneers of the town. Each story was in itself interesting. The book held my attention but mainly because I kept expecting more from Ms. Hoffman. You figure you know why the garden only grows red plants, but when you are told for sure it is not exciting or compelling at all. I just thought....oh, I knew that. The ending is flat as well. I like good endings that leave me feeling satisfied. I was not satisfied. I just sat there and thought 'is that all there is?'
An interesting read but I would not call it a good read. Not my favorite Alice Hoffman volume.
An interesting read but I would not call it a good read. Not my favorite Alice Hoffman volume.
October 26, 2012
I love alice hoffman, I was seriously dissapointed in this book. I almost always finish a book but I gave up halfway through on this one. This book is incredibly boring. You just get into the characters and then your on the next chapter, which is a totally different generation of settlers and you have to start getting into a whole different story. I kept waiting and hoping for it to pick one and stick with it but it never did. Its been ages since I have actually given up on a book and I expected better from Alice Hoffman.
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