Skylight Confessions: A Novel [Kindle Edition]

Alice Hoffman (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Winningham's narration is just right. Her pronunciation is clear but not exaggerated, and nicely combined with the rhythmic, conversational speed of a good storyteller. She has a rich voice with a good vocal range. This book is another of the wildly popular "ghost" romances that come under the rubric "woman's fiction," and another of Hoffman's dark fairy tales. Orphaned at 17, Arlie determines to love and marry the first man who comes down the street. This is John Moody, a "distant, quiet man" who ignores her and her children throughout their marriage, but is plagued by her ghost after her early death. Arlie's ghost is visible only to Moody and to the narrator, Meredith, who follows the ghost home to the glass house where Arlie lived out her miserable marriage and died. The book is loaded with telltale names and laborious symbols—ashes, dishes, stones, bones, birds, glass and all things red or white—but the characters are as human as fairy tale permits, and Hoffman's prose is lively and absorbing. This book will be a favorite of women's fiction and Hoffman fans.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Hoffman works with her own private deck of tarot cards to create psychologically rich, mystical tales infused with a sexy form of magic realism sprung from the union of romance and tragedy. In her latest gothic fairy tale of doomed passion and indelible guilt, Arlyn, 17, is utterly alone in the world until, like a mermaid casting her spell over a lost sailor, she pulls John Moody into her orbit and refuses to let go. A student at Yale, he is the lackluster son of an architect famous for building a Connecticut house known as the Glass Slipper. In a sinister variation on the nursery rhyme about the woman who lived in a shoe, the mismatched couple dwell precariously in the comfortless glass mansion with their solemn son, Sam, and, later, a daughter, Blanca, who isn't even a year old when cancer claims Arlyn. But death doesn't dispel Arlyn's powers. As birds inexplicitly flock to the Glass Slipper, dishes break without being touched, and soot rains down, Sam, a promising artist, loses his way in a labyrinth of narcotics, even as help arrives in the form of a young woman also haunted by her dead. Hoffman's shimmering, multigenerational melodrama bewitches with supernatural imagery. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 345 KB
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (January 11, 2007)
• Sold by: Hachette Book Group
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000Q80T16
• Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #219,459 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

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

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning work by Hoffman, February 2, 2007

By 

Ellen Meister (NY, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Skylight Confessions: A Novel (Hardcover)

Once again, Alice Hoffman manages to create an otherworldly reality that feels completely grounded, with characters so touching and authentic they got right under my skin and stayed there. Other reviewers have done a good job of summarizing the plot, so I'll just say that this book has an unusual structure in that the protagonist changes somewhere in the middle, and it works. This is, more anything, a story that explores the idea of destiny, and asks questions about love along the way. Of course, Hoffman pulls all of this off with language so precise and beautiful my heart melted in my chest.

--Ellen Meister, author of Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Heartbreak & Hope, January 28, 2007

By 

Wantz Upon A Time Reviews (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Skylight Confessions: A Novel (Hardcover)

After her father's death, Arlyn Singer follows what she believes to be her destiny and weds John Moody. Completely mismatched, they wade through marriage and early parenthood, sometimes just barely keeping it together.

A devastating disease tears the family apart, leaving John to parent his troubled son and baby girl in a literal house of glass. Life moves on with a new wife and the help of a nanny. Yes, life moves on. But it isn't easy, as three generations of this family discover.

Hoffman's generational tale follows the paths taken by Arlyn's family. Each member faces what it means to live in the "Glass Slipper" house and beyond. It follows the family's potential devolution as Sam's brilliance is sucked away through drugs and alcohol, and Blanca is driven away by forces she hardly understands. As heartbreaking as it is hopeful, many layers of depth can be found buried in these pages.

Numerous point-of-view shifts make some scenes hard to follow, but this is otherwise a very readable novel. SKYLIGHT CONFESSIONS will speak to anyone fascinated by family structure and the human spirit.

Reviewed by Christina Wantz Fixemer

01/28/2007

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Philosopical, Penetrating Prose, November 2, 2007

By 

Gayla M. Collins (Sheridan, WY) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Skylight Confessions: A Novel (Hardcover)

As an avid fan of Alice Hoffman and her "magic realism" I order her books hardcover I am so sure of their enjoyment. I know the prose will be a lyrical, colorful, elegant and memorizing while tackling dark issues. I know I will be utterly consumed and unable to read just a bit here and there. I know I will come away pondering and appreciating the read for all it's beauty and ugliness. "Skylight Confessions" did NOT let me down.

Based on the premise of do we destine our fate or is it predestined for us, this story starts with Arlyn and John Moody and a marriage that both forced into being. From this union a prodigy of unhappiness, discontentment and violence explodes. Indeed dark subject matter, it is beautifully projected in what may be or not be. Are their specters? If so then is there presence to revenge or guide? Is there true evil? Are the sins of the father visited upon the sons or are the sons excused by the sin? Is destiny fated or do our decisions determine our future? Are we responsible for our actions or are we forced to play them out to their appointed destiny?

I read this book in an evening and into the wee hours as I could not put it down. Hoffman's lyrical prose tenderizes the rough grist of a story told with raw realism as well as magical. Her conjectures open the mind of the reader to introspection without imposing her own dogma.

A magnificent read that exercises mentally as well as entertains with liquid prose.