The Dovekeepers: A Novel [Hardcover]

Alice Hoffman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 4, 2011

Over five years in the writing,

The Dovekeepers is Alice Hoffman’s most ambitious and mesmerizing novel, a tour de force of imagination and research, set in ancient Israel.

In 70 C.E., nine hundred Jews held out for months against armies of Romans on Masada, a mountain in the Judean desert. According to the ancient historian Josephus, two women and five children survived. Based on this tragic and iconic event, Hoffman’s novel is a spellbinding tale of four extraordinarily bold, resourceful, and sensuous women, each of whom has come to Masada by a different path. Yael’s mother died in childbirth, and her father, an expert assassin, never forgave her for that death. Revka, a village baker’s wife, watched the horrifically brutal murder of her daughter by Roman soldiers; she brings to Masada her young grandsons, rendered mute by what they have witnessed. Aziza is a warrior’s daughter, raised as a boy, a fearless rider and an expert marksman who finds passion with a fellow soldier. Shirah, born in Alexandria, is wise in the ways of ancient magic and medicine, a woman with uncanny insight and power.

The lives of these four complex and fiercely independent women intersect in the desperate days of the siege. All are dovekeepers, and all are also keeping secrets—about who they are, where they come from, who fathered them, and whom they love. The Dovekeepers is Alice Hoffman’s masterpiece.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2011: Yael was born of a dead mother and father who knows how to become invisible. Revka learned silence when her grandsons lost their voices after witnessing their mother’s brutal murder. Aziza became a boy to protect herself, and hates being forced to turn back into a woman. And Shirah will do anything to protect those she loves from the horrors of the world. The power and violence of these women is evident in every word of The Dovekeepers. Hoffman’s prose is vivid and unforgettable, scorching like the desert heat, and will stay with you long after you finish the last page. A story of sacrifice, endurance, and above all, survival, The Dovekeepers is homage to anyone who’s ever held fast to their beliefs in the face of nearly insurmountable adversity. --Malissa Kent

Review

USA Today
Alice Hoffman weaves fiction and fact in The Dovekeepers, a thrilling, passionate saga of four women who come together to tend the doves in Masada. 
Hoffman's fiction is always compelling, but the history within The Dovekeepers makes this novel haunting.

The Boston Globe

Alice Hoffman's "The Dovekeepers'' is a splendid entertainment, a harrowing, thrilling, feminist historical novel fueled to fever pitch by a rich imagination... a combination of good writing, affecting themes, and dramatic storytelling. It's an enthralling tale that lingers in the mind.

St. Louis Dispatch

If a world of strong women and their complex relationships with one another doesn't draw you into Alice Hoffman's brilliant new novel, "The Dovekeepers," read it for Hoffman's fine sense of narrative, history and detail as she shares the story of four women who come by various paths to Masada.

Entertainment Weekly

The women in The Dovekeepers are physically and spiritually strong, they have elemental female desires when it comes to love, sex, and children...the author grounds her expansive, intricately woven and deepest new novel in biblical history, with a devotion and seriousness of purpose that may surprise even her most constant fans.

"I am still reeling from The Dovekeepers--from the history Alice Hoffman illuminates, from the language she uses to bring these women to life. This novel is a testament to the human spirit and to love rising from the ashes of war. But most of all, this novel is one that will never be forgotten by a reader." --Jodi Picoult, author of Sing You Home

"Beautiful, harrowing, a major contribution to twenty-first century literature."—Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate in Literature

“In her remarkable new novel, Alice Hoffman holds a mirror to our ancient past as she explores the contemporary themes of sexual desire, women's solidarity in the face of strife, and the magic that's quietly present in our day-to-day living. Put The Dovekeepers at the pinnacle of Hoffman's extraordinary body of work. I was blown away.” —Wally Lamb, author of The Hour I First Believed

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (October 4, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 145161747X
• ISBN-13: 978-1451617474
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (136 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,535 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #6 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Jewish American

More About the Author

Alice Hoffman was born in New York City on March 16, 1952 and grew up on Long Island. After graduating from high school in 1969, she attended Adelphi University, from which she received a BA, and then received a Mirrellees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, which she attended in 1973 and 74, receiving an MA in creative writing. She currently lives in Boston and New York.

Hoffman's first novel, Property Of, was written at the age of twenty-one, while she was studying at Stanford, and published shortly thereafter by Farrar Straus and Giroux. She credits her mentor, professor and writer Albert J. Guerard, and his wife, the writer Maclin Bocock Guerard, for helping her to publish her first short story in the magazine Fiction. Editor Ted Solotaroff then contacted her to ask if she had a novel, at which point she quickly began to write what was to become Property Of, a section of which was published in Mr. Solotaroff's magazine, American Review.

Since that remarkable beginning, Alice Hoffman has become one of our most distinguished novelists. She has published a total of eighteen novels, two books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults. Her novel, Here on Earth, an Oprah Book Club choice, was a modern reworking of some of the themes of Emily Bronte's masterpiece Wuthering Heights. Practical Magic was made into a Warner film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Her novel, At Risk, which concerns a family dealing with AIDS, can be found on the reading lists of many universities, colleges and secondary schools. Her advance from Local Girls, a collection of inter-related fictions about love and loss on Long Island, was donated to help create the Hoffman (Women's Cancer) Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA. Blackbird House is a book of stories centering around an old farm on Cape Cod. Hoffman's recent books include Aquamarine and Indigo, novels for pre-teens, and The New York Times bestsellers The River King, Blue Diary, The Probable Future, and The Ice Queen. Green Angel, a post-apocalyptic fairy tale about loss and love, was published by Scholastic and The Foretelling, a book about an Amazon girl in the Bronze Age, was published by Little Brown. In 2007 Little Brown published the teen novel Incantation, a story about hidden Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, which Publishers Weekly has chosen as one of the best books of the year. In January 2007, Skylight Confessions, a novel about one family's secret history, was released on the 30th anniversary of the publication of Her first novel. Her most recent novel is The Story Sisters (2009), published by Shaye Areheart Books.

Hoffman's work has been published in more than twenty translations and more than one hundred foreign editions. Her novels have received mention as notable books of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People Magazine. She has also worked as a screenwriter and is the author of the original screenplay "Independence Day" a film starring Kathleen Quinlan and Diane Wiest. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, Redbook, Architectural Digest, Gourmet, Self, and other magazines. Her teen novel Aquamarine was recently made into a film starring Emma Roberts.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

322 of 329 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Weighty and Fulfilling Read - Highly Recommended, September 9, 2011

By 

Jason Golomb (Northern Virginia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dovekeepers: A Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

"Dovekeepers" is the first book I've read of Alice Hoffmans'. In fact, one evening my wife looked at the book while I was reading in bed and said: "You're reading Alice Hoffman? I've read Alice Hoffman. But you don't read Alice Hoffman!"

And so I DID read Alice Hoffman and I liked Alice Hoffman. This is a very good book. It's real deep and very weighty.

"Dovekeepers" orbits around the real life events of the early 70s A.D. in ancient Judea. Rome was large and in charge and in the midst of shattering a Judean rebellion (seen commemorated in the famous Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum only a few hundred yards from the Colosseum in Italy). Several hundred Jews fled Jerusalem to the desert near the Dead Sea and moved into the former mountain fortress of King Herod at Masada. While the proud Jewish rebels held off a Roman legion for several years, Rome ultimately prevailed and all but two women and five children killed themselves rather than allow themselves to be overrun.

Hoffman's novel follows the lives of four women who all find themselves on Masada. Each woman has a dedicated 100-150 pages that weave in and out of each other's stories with the collective whole building a comprehensive picture of their mutual plight. The stories connect the women together in ways that are obvious and follow the primary arc of the novel, but also in ways that are surprising and poignantly fulfilling. The connections build and develop on many levels: physically, emotionally, and symbolically.

The book is full of characters who are broken and hurt; affected by some deep trauma catalyzed by the Roman attacks on Jerusalem; driving each, by their own will or otherwise, to the fortress in the desert. One of Hoffman's women is Yael, a deeply fractured and self actualizing individual who sums up the disparate journeys that brought the women to Masada: "We came like doves across the desert. In a time when there was nothing but death, we were grateful for anything, and most grateful of all when we awoke to another day."

You'll feel the weight of each character's pain and sorrow increase as the novel progresses. There are few happy endings. Hoffman's themes cover the gamut from fate and destiny, to religion and love, and the depths of devotion.

Faith is a thread that runs throughout Hoffman's carefully woven tapestry. It's not just a religious entity, but something that binds individuals, family units, as well as the entire rebel community. In Revka, Hoffman ponders the rebel Jews: "If we lost our faith, we would become like the clouds that swell across the western sky when the wind pushes them into the desert promising rain but empty inside." It's through Revka also that Hoffman finally (about half-way through he book) provides a heart-wrenchingly warm and genuinely surprising treat at the end of her particular novella. For the first time the furrow on my brow melted into a smile on my face (note: it didn't last very long).

Hoffman's Judean world is one of religion and tradition, of myth and magic: a world where everything in it has significance...symbolic or real. Some vignettes read almost as something out of a fantasy novel, but there's no melodrama to their weight.

In looking for a good way to summarize the books' tone, I found a couple of strong quotes. This first comes from Shirah, `The Witch of Moab': "Being human means losing everything we love best in the world. But would you ask to be anything else?" This second is from Revka: "...our waking life is formed by our sorrow. " In each character is anchored a heavy weight.

In this misogynistic society, few men come across in a truly positive light. Though Hoffman writes very sparingly, in her few words, she's able to expresses a multiplicity of ideas and thoughts. Characters are never solely what they seem to be and there is very little that is purely black or white. Hoffman's world is filled with shades of gray.

This book is going to resonate strongly for a lot of readers. It may be a bit polarizing because of its very serious nature. But as a first time reader of Hoffman, and a male, I feel fuller for having read this novel. I highly recommend it.

96 of 100 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow, great, great book, September 12, 2011

By 

Annie B (USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dovekeepers: A Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

First I admit to being a huge Alice Hoffman fan. This book, however, is not Hoffman's typical book. It is as the book description says very ambitious. For me, Hoffman's ambitions succeeded beyond my imagination. I loved this book, the characters, the setting, the debates it caused in my own mind over faith and religion.

Still, I think this book requires a lot of patience to read. It isn't a genre fiction novel and is long because it was designed to be that way in order to give the characters and the history involved as much space as possible. This is not a book to sit down with and try to read during commercials while watching television. It's a book that requires time and effort--but that time and effor will be well worth it! Just don't expect an average Alice Hoffman book and read it for what it is--a great literary fiction novel. Few writers could bring off this book at all and certainly not with Hoffman's writing expertise. Parts of the book are just brilliantly written and worth reading just for that beauty alone.

Overall, fantastic read. Already wishing there was a new Alice Hoffman book on the horizon!

201 of 229 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too Much, Too Long, September 3, 2011

By 

Mary Lins (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dovekeepers: A Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

I'm afraid this review of Alice Hoffman's latest novel, "The Dovekeepers", is going to be unpopular with her fans. I understand because I'm also a fan of Hoffman's novels - usually. But I think that in "The Dovekeepers", readers are just going to be overwhelmed with too much of the things that we usually like about Hoffman's novels. I'll try to explain:

"The Dovekeepers" is the story of the Roman defeat of the Jews at Masada ~70 C.E. told from the perspectives of four women who had sought refuge there in the stronghold built by King Herod. Each narrator's section of the story is quite long and detailed. Each contains much much much Hoffman-trademarked magic, omens, superstitions, potions, spells, witches, angels, demons,ghosts, amulets, symbols, beasts...you get the idea. I think if each of these stories had been shortened and had less of the "other-world"-ness it would have moved along better.

But, maybe that's just me. Maybe readers who really get into the magical, spiritual, ethereal stuff will just ADORE this novel. For me it was too much of what should be "just enough"; an avalanche of what should have been a sprinkling. However, I'm still a Hoffman fan, and will certainly look forward to her next offering.