Customer Reviews

River King

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

In all her novels, Alice Hoffman has the ability to make us laugh and cry with her beautifully poetic prose, and her uncanny way of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary. THE RIVER KING takes place in the small town of Haddan, Massachusetts, a place divided into two sides...those who were born and raised in the village, and the privileged few who attend the prestigious Haddan School. When a sudden and inexplicable death occurs, the town's history and secerts are revealed and the intertwined lives of Carlin Leander, Gus Pierce, Betsy Chase and Abel Grey are unraveled on that fateful night. While this may not be Ms. Hoffman's strongest work, the story is truly alluring and beautifully written. I can only compare her writing to oil on canvas...so clear and lush, it is almost as if the words form pictures on each page. If you are a fan of Ms. Hoffman, read THE RIVER KING.

Maybe it's my age and maybe it's Alice Hoffman, but I continue to be deeply moved by her stories as they stay with me long after I've read the last page, closed the book, logged its title into my book list and found a proper place for it on one of my shelves. When I read a book by Alice Hoffman I am transported into the world of which she writes. THE RIVER KING was no exception. I could smell the roses that grew on the grounds of the Haddan School, feel the pain of Gus and Carlin, of Betsy and Abel, of Helen Davis and her false love. When you read an Alice Hoffman novel you are never left behind. Her words invite you into the story and as you settle comfortably into place you are amazed and dismayed when you realize there are only a few pages left to read. THE RIVER KING is magical in a way only Alice Hoffman can create magic. Her ability to spin a tale of love and mystery and sadness and joy is unmatched.

To truly experience Alice Hoffman's work, you need the ability to suspend all rational thought for a bit. Hoffman's tales are conjured with both a writer's voice and a magician's wand. She is never boring.

In THE RIVER KING, Ms. Hoffman tells the story of a small town in Massachusetts...she divides the town into the haves and the have nots. An elite private school adds to the class distinctions.

When one of Haddan School's students is found drowned in the troubled Haddan River, city and students alike are effected.

Haddan School's own troubled past becomes part of Hoffman's tapestry. The fragrance of roses appears in the middle of winter. Fish appear out of nowhere. The dead boy's image shows up in photographs. Bees swarm in October. Mysterious illness strikes students. No one rests until the mystery is solved.

THE RIVER KING is one of Hoffman's best efforts. It is not light, easy, summertime reading. It is to be savored and will linger with you long after you've finished. Like Hoffman's past work, some mysteries are solved. Some will never be.

That's what it's like to read a good Alice Hoffman story.

Enjoy!

The Hadden School, an elite private school on the banks of the Hadden River, has had a very checkered past since it was built in 1858. No child from the town has ever been admitted and the Hadden students and townies never mix. When a student, August Pierce is found dead, floating in the Hadden River, both worlds come crashing together as Abel Grey, town policeman becomes determined, despite the wishes of both the school and the town to close the case quickly, to find out what actually happened. His investigation into possible foul play begins to unravel the secret lives of both the students and town residents. Alice Hoffman spends almost the first half of this book setting the suspenseful and compelling atmosphere, and because her writing is so detailed and at times overly descriptive, it bogs the plot down at times. That said, her writing is eloquent and her scenes so vivid you begin to smell the river and feel the damp, cold air of Massachusetts. This is a story of love, loss, betrayal and finally hope as the characters, so beautifully drawn, begin to come apart, piece by piece, as the truth comes to the surface. The River King is a powerful story told with great insight and wisdom that leaves the reader both sad and hopeful at the end of the book.

If you have not read any of Alice Hoffman's books yet, I urge you to do so. This novel about the mystery surrounding a boarding school in Massachusetts is an excellent place to begin. When the Haddon School's headmaster marries a local girl, thus begins a history of sorrow that invades the school & carries on for many years, touching everyone in some way or another. As in her other books, life is never ordinary, and magic is everywhere. As usual, Ms. Hoffman writes with extraordinary talent and a touch of magic in her pen. This is the reason Alice Hoffman is my absolute favorite author. Please, do yourself a favor and buy this book.

Alice Hoffman is a wonderful writer known for her books filled with magical realism, similar to authors like Isabel Allende (House of Spirits) and Laura Esquivel(Like Water for Chocolate). This author also write the book Practical Magic which was made into a movie starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman.

And while Alice Hoffman's latest book, The River King, is also filled with imagery and a writer's vivid imagination, as a reader I felt as though something went wrong with this book. And I'm stil not sure what happened since I have always enjoye dHogfman's books mreo than other authors'.

The River King takes place at a boarding school where previously all sorts of strange things have happened. It is a classic tale of the haves and the have nots as students from various backgrounds assmeble the first day. One motherless young man is sent by his father to try and make his way in the world while a young woman,a scholarship student, feels very out of place. The teachers have made their own alliances while the old timers reminisce about the way things use to be. And rounding out the characters are the townspoeple clearly though to be the have nots and yest the ones who are keepers of the Haddan School secrets.

What a young man is found floating in the river, an investigation begins to see, if in fact, he killed himself by drowning or if he was killed. With a cast of interesting and eccentric charcters, I thought this book would have been as good as some of Hoffman's other titles. Unfortunately, nothing in this book really grabbed me or caused me to gulp it down. Also, the topic wasn't that new or or presented in a fresh manner that I finsihed it with that feeling that I was sad it ended.Ultimately I was left disappointed in the plot and outcome.

If you're interested in reading Hoffman books which will captivate you then do read Turtle Moon, Practical Magic or Local Girls. These titles are among the very best I've read from her so far. And luckily, I still have quite a few titles left to read.

This was an easy book to read if you like Hoffman's other books. Full of eccentric characters and vivid landscapes that burn themselves into your soul. Trouble is, when the settings become more interesting than the narrative, you know there's a bit of a problem. I love Hoffman's sense of place. She knows New England and lives in my neck of the woods. Small towns really are the way she portrays them. Everyone knows your business (and your name) and nothing escapes a sharp pair of eyes peering from behind lace curtains. Hoffman insists on telling you about everyone and everything, and while she gives you lots of food for thought, it can be a bit distracting.

The premise is simple. There are the Haves and there are the Have Nots. Neither side has any love for the other side, but when someone goes and gets himself drowned at the prep school, it's up to the persistence of a local cop to solve the mystery. The River King is an amalgem of different genres: romance, murder mystery, and ghost story. Hoffman's prose is like the roses that inhabit this novel: heavy and rather like the perfume of blooms lingering in an overheated funeral parlor. She also has a bad habit of switching points of view in mid-paragraph. You are reading about one character's thoughts when she dashes inside the head of another character and throws out useless facts about yet another character. If not for this tendency of hers, I would have enjoyed this a lot more.

No one is her equal when it comes to scenic descriptions, and some of her characters are genuinely likable, but she needs to pare down her cast of thousands and stick to whatever point she is trying to make instead of meandering through the story like the gentle waters of the Haddan river.

Alice Hoffman has a command of the written word that is equaled by very few authors. Her exquisite prose employs all five senses, and when the reader opens one of her novels magic happens. Sights and smells subtlely drift from the pages; the sounds of a summer night and the taste of icy winter air, the caress of a breeze; all entice you to enter her world. As with her other novels, The River King allows the reader to see into the hearts and souls of her characters. Love is the thing that drives us and makes us human, Ms. Hoffman tells us. But be careful about whom and how you love, and about who loves you - while love defines us, it can also destroy us. Alice Hoffman's skills as a writer are at their finest in two of her earlier works, Turtle Moon and Practical Magic, but each of her novels, including The River King, are pleasures that a fiction lover should not miss. I would caution you to be careful when you enter her worlds - you may never want to leave.

The combination of mythic tone and down-to-earth characterizations make Alice Hoffman's fourteenth novel a beguiling read that lingers in the mind long after the last page is turned.

Set in fictional Haddan, Mass., the story revolves around the divide between a snooty private boarding school and the town itself. The Haddan School was built on the banks of the muddy Haddan River in 1858, the year of a horrific storm which flooded the town and the new school worst of all so that: "To this day, frogs can be found in the plumbing; linens and clothes stored in closets have a distinctly weedy odor, as if each article had been washed in river water and never thoroughly dried."

Each five-mile trek to the nearest public high school in "weather so cold the badgers kept to their dens" increased the locals' animosity toward the boarding school, "a small bump on the skin of ill will ready to rupture at the slightest contact." But over the years town and gown have reached an accommodation. The school gives money and the town stays out of school affairs.

Into this atmosphere come two new students, poor but strikingly beautiful Carlin Leander, and quirky, brilliant misfit August Pierce. Long desperate to escape her rural Florida home, Carlin has gained admittance on a swimming scholarship and has high hopes that Haddan will be the start of her new and better life. August has no such illusions. For him, this is just the latest in a misery of schools, though he hopes to stick it out for his father's sake.

But Carlin fits in no better than August who has been admitted to the moldiest and most exclusive of the dorms by dint of his on-paper accomplishments. While Carlin discovers that her clothes are impossible and her roommates don't even speak the same language, August's housemates band together against him. An unlikely duo, drawn together by despair, the two become best friends until Carlin, flattered, begins dating the most popular, most handsome boy on campus, August's chief enemy, a boy of easy charm and loathsomeness.

Vaguely aware of the emotional maelstrom ever brewing among their students are new teacher Betsy Chase, who supervises Carlin's dorm, (St. Anne's, so called because a beautiful local girl, who married an esteemed headmaster, hung herself in its attic) and her fiancé, Eric Herman, an aloof, ambitious sort who supervises August's dorm.

When a student drowns, the Haddan Police Department quickly accedes to the school's wishes and closes the case. Except for one detective, Abel Grey, whose brother committed suicide at about the same age and whose lonely life has been haunted and emotionally arid ever since. Investigating at the school, Abel meets Betsy and it's love at first sight, though Betsy remains committed to her wedding plans.

As Abel's investigation gathers momentum, the various characters are forced to take sides. Their decisions and actions reveal inner cores of weakness or strength. The story moves toward a mythic climax, but each decision is individual, quirky and human. Hoffman's protagonists are appealing and real, complete with uncertainties, selfishness, fears and courage.

The atmosphere, tinged with otherworldliness, with ghostly presences wafting through the hallways and lingering at the fringes, lends a timeless, bittersweet melancholy to an affirming, enchanting story of love, personal integrity and hope.

I love the way Alice Hoffman writes. Her phrasing is lyrical, her scenes vivid and evocative. Her characters are usually well drawn. However, this book was not her best. I came away feeling that there were just too many ideas or themes floating around in this book, none of them in any depth. The characters just did not feel fully fleshed out. The writing style, as always, is beautiful, though. You can picture the town and the school and especially the river. I just felt that the characters were lacking. The one character, Gus, seemed to be the most interesting, and he wasn't in the story for long. Alice Hoffman always does young people, especially troubled young people, very well. Her young people really ring true. She also does a certain type of man very well, and older women, especially those with a past. All of these are her strong suits. But adult women seem to be her weak point. Betsy in this book really is not believable. Maybe it's because we don't really get to know her. As I said, I love Alice Hoffman's style and always look forward to her books. This just wasn't her best. Try "Turtle Moon" or "Second Nature" for good, believable characters, and good plot.

Kathleen