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According to the critics, The Red Garden is among Alice Hoffman's recent best. She can occasionally be melodramatic, her stories overrun by fairy tale syntax. Although the magical abounds hereÑwomen become eelsÑthere is little, if anything, that is overdone. Not every story is wholly believable, but "Hoffman's consciously simple style transforms people's pain into mythic parable" (Washington Post), so that the mythic then becomes lore. Only the Boston Globe cited the collection as somewhat uneve
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I especially enjoyed the weaving of life's tapestry from one generation to the next -- the laying out of the basic design in the early stories, then the layers of color and complexity added with each family history. I wish, however, that the magic of the early stories had carried on through the final stories. The last stories appeared mundane, the characters somewhat trite, as if they also desperately wished that they were infused with the creative powers and mystery of their ancestors -- as if
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Each chapter is a vignette of a family member / plot of land though a 250 year time span set in the area of Blackwell, MA. The stories are typical Hoffman - mystical & fairy tale like – highlighting both the light and darker aspects of love. An easy book to pick up and put down.
I'm not a big short story fan, but I liked how Hoffman's interconnected stories told the history and lore of this small town in the mountains of Massachusetts. Some of the stories were sad tales, others charming, some ghost stories and others were simply magical. You could trace the roots of this town from the founding settlers to the present as ancestors were introduced in each story. This is pure and simple storytelling as imagined if it was being handed down from generation to generation. The
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