Customer Reviews

The Drowning Season

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While browsing thru notes I made on books read years and years ago, I came across my remarks about Angel Landing, another Hoffman book, and remembered how impressed I was with her writing style and characters. I decided to see if she had written any more books and had no idea she had written so many others, including one selected by Oprah's reading group. I was not disappointed to be reading her again. Her characters, always quirky and strange, are written in such a lyrical tone that they seem very real and human. In The Drowining Season, Esther the White is the matriarch of a very dysfunctional yet loving family. Hoffman slowly reveals the past deceptions and future dreams of all the family members culminating in life-changing decisions made by all three generations. Your only hope is that all will have found the peace and love so desired. A great read!

After reading Turtle Moon I had a quest for more of Alice Hoffman. The Drowning Season gives a unique perspective of issues that I had never looked at before - namely death and obsession with a quest. Suicide is not an easy topic, but this is an eye opener. Hoffman has a timemachine built into her novels that transports us into these worlds almost through magic. I have never been disappointed with any of her novels, and eagerly look forward to the next adventure into the human spirit that she takes me on. Her characters are human and fallible - like all of us. The stories are lessons learned that touch our lives over and over again. She is so timely with stories on AIDs, abuse, gangs, new age beliefs, abandoned unwanted juveniles, and even crime. Each is almost a modern day parable. I couldn't put this book down, it traveled with me until I finished it.

The characters of this book are more eccentric than my neighbors.

The tales intertwined in this book belong more in a 19th century novel than they do in today's writing world.

The biases and idiosyncracies of the characters are Hoffman-esque. Oh, are they ever so ever Hoffman.

By the time we learn what a drowning season is, we learn that the person who likes to attempt hydro-suicide ventures (almost as often as the tortoises lay their eggs) is not necessarily the most mentally disturbed family member. Maybe, you have to think, the others drove him to the shores to fill his lungs with salt water.

Hoffman writes well. Extremely well. And, knowing that many of her other books deal with single women raising teenage kids -- something which I must assume she knows a lot about -- this book surprises you as it stays away from that common theme.

If you do not like this book, I can guarantee you will not like many (or most) of her other novels.

Alice Hoffman gives us a tale here in which the reader needs to pay attention to fully appreciate.
It begins with family elders emigrating from Europe & brings us to 20th Century Long Island. The dysfunction starts from the get-go.
It's quite an interesting story of the darker side of the human psyche. Almost all the seven deadly sins take place among the book's self-serving familial characters. Almost everyone who reads this can probably identify with one or more of the characters.
In a family in which there appears no redeeming qualities among both young & old; there eventually forms a strange bond between the two main characters. Both named Esther.

Supposedly taking place on LI (Where I'm from) any reference to Long Island seems contrived & there really is no basis of reference geographically.

It's an oldie. But, if you haven't read it give it a shot. If you pay attention to the interaction among the very strong characters, the book is quite good

This story exemplifies Alice Hoffman's talent for drawing the dysfunctional family so well. The characters, although weird, were each likeable in their own way, and it was captivating to read about their plight.