Fiction, Fiction Subjects

Skylight Confessions

Name: Skylight Confessions
Author: Alice Hoffman
ISBN: 9780316017879

by Alice Hoffman

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Overview

Writing at the height of her powers, Alice Hoffman conjures three generations of a family haunted by love.
Cool, practical, and deliberate, John is dreamy Arlyn's polar opposite. Yet the two are drawn powerfully together even when it is clear they are bound to bring each other grief. Their difficult marriage leads them and their children to a house made of glass in the Connecticut countryside, to the avenues of Manhattan, and to the blue waters of Long Island Sound. Glass breaks, love hurts, and families make their own rules. Ultimately, it falls to their grandson, Will, to solve the emotional puzzle of his family and of his own identity.

Synopsis

Writing at the height of her powers, Alice Hoffman conjures three generations of a family haunted by love.

Cool, practical, and deliberate, John is dreamy Arlyn's polar opposite. Yet the two are drawn powerfully together even when it is clear they are bound to bring each other grief. Their difficult marriage leads them and their children to a house made of glass in the Connecticut countryside, to the avenues of Manhattan, and to the blue waters of Long Island Sound. Glass breaks, love hurts, and families make their own rules. Ultimately, it falls to their grandson, Will, to solve the emotional puzzle of his family and of his own identity.

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. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 6). (Jan.)

About the Author, Alice Hoffman

In a prolific career that began with early writings in the American Review, Alice Hoffman has expanded and developed the idea of family and community -- the forces that bind it together and the forces that drive it apart -- with understated and elegant prose and powerful and complex characters.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

On the day of her father's funeral, 17-year-old Arlyn Singer carves out the terms of her family's destiny. She decides impulsively that the great love of her life will be the first man she encounters on the street. Yalie John Moody, the son of a famous architect, slips into the role when, later that day, he asks Arlyn for directions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the marriage is a disaster; Arlyn takes a lover, then dies giving birth to her second child. Alice Hoffman's Skylight Confessions follows her survivors as they play the cards dealt out by a teenager's whim. Lines of destiny; lives of choice.

Donna Seaman

Hoffman's shimmering, multigenerational melodrama bewitches with supernatural imagery while imaginatively dramatizing all-too-common heartaches.
— Booklist

Ann Harleman

Among the many pleasures of Skylight Confessions is a sense of continuous corner-turning, a chain of surprises. . . . Skylight Confessions is about the unresolvable contradictions that lie at the heart of life.
— Boston Globe

Good Housekeeping

Hoffman's brand of magical realism squeezes caring out of hard-to-reach places and ends up being a celebration of love.

Parade

Wholly original and haunting.

Victoria A. Brownworth

Hoffman is one of our great storytellers and one who knows the American family in all its many facets. In Skylight Confessions, she has once again written a story and characters that are truly unforgettable. A novel to be savored.
— Baltimore Sun

Gail Pennington

Haunting. . . . This isn't just Hoffman's best recent novel; it's one of the best of a distinguished list. . . . Long after the last page is turned, the characters and their stories are impossible to forget.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Martha Woodall

Alice Hoffman remains a literary sorceress par excellence. . . . In a novel that unfolds like a dream, Hoffman reminds readers that love and family create the most potent magic of all.
— Philadelphia Inquirer

Andrea Chapin

Alice Hoffman has written her most spellbinding, accomplished novel yet. . . . Although this is Hoffman's nineteenth book, it feels utterly fresh. Her voice — touched by the cadences of fairy tales — buoys us through the novel's saddest currents.
— More

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. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 6). (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

In Hoffman's 19th novel, a young woman becomes the victim of the destiny she's created, leaving behind a splintered family. On the day of her father's funeral, 17-year-old Arlyn Singer decides the first man who walks down the street will be her one love. That night, Yale senior John Moody stops to ask directions, and Arlyn and John take the first passionate steps toward what will become a marriage of heartache and mutual betrayal. After John's architect father dies, the couple moves into his Connecticut home, a glass house called the Glass Slipper, and Arlyn has an affair with a local laborer. She dies while her second child is still young, and the story forks to follow the divergent paths taken by the Moody children. Sam, the self-destructive first-born, spray paints his angst all over lower Manhattan and has a son before disappearing. Blanca, Sam's sister and the only family member he loves, moves to London and opens a bookstore. John remarries, to Cynthia, and has another daughter, but carries a family secret with him to his grave. Ghostly apparitions lend an air of dark enchantment, though the numerous dream sequences feel heavy-handed. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A Connecticut ferryboat captain dies, leaving his motherless 17-year-old daughter, Arlyn, an orphan. On the day of his funeral, red-haired Arlie invites fate into her home and her bed in the form of John Moody, a lost Yale student of architecture, thus cementing a multigenerational dance of misery. Moody spent three days loving Arlie and a lifetime resenting their marriage. And he has little interest in their son, Sam, a fragile little boy devoted to his mother. It is Sam's train wreck of an adolescence that is at the heart of Hoffman's 19th novel. Arlie's early death strands Sam; baby Blanca; Arlie's lover, George Snow; and even Moody in separate emotional hells. They are only partially saved by the appearance of Meredith, a college student who follows Arlie's ghost to the Moody home and signs on as the nanny. Hoffman's gift for framing otherworldly elements in down-to-earth language intensifies the flawed resolve of the tragic Moodys as they desperately pummel their way through loss and grief and, maybe, redemption. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/06.] Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A Yale senior loses his way on Long Island, and three generations suffer the consequences in this haunting latest from Hoffman (The Ice Queen, 2005, etc.). Convinced that he's the true love she promised herself as her father lay dying, orphaned 17-year-old Arlie Singer seduces John Moody moments after he stops to ask for directions. Stunned by his recklessness, the normally cautious and tidy John hightails it back to college. But Arlie will not be denied, so they are married too young, have baby Sam too soon and, after John's parents move to Florida, are trapped full-time in the Glass Slipper, an all-windows house designed by his father, a famous architect. John ignores his own brilliant, odd son and hardly ever comes home from work. Arlie, realizing she's made a terrible mistake, falls in love with George Snow, who washes the Glass Slipper's windows. She won't leave Sam, even after she has George's baby-John, typically, seems oblivious-but she's stricken with breast cancer and dead at 25. Sam grows up angry and bereft; at 16, he has a full-fledged drug habit, and even his devoted ten-year-old sister Blanca can't keep him in the house he hates with the father he loathes. Hoffman spins a grim fairy tale, complete with an unsympathetic stepmother (Cynthia, who was sleeping with John before Arlie died) and a strange nanny (Meredith, who follows John to Connecticut because she's the only one besides him who sees Arlie's ghost hovering around). But while unsparingly depicting the awful damage unhappy people inflict on each other, the author refuses to provide villains; even clueless, thoughtless John is at heart terrified and remorseful. His final actions suggest that it's never too late tosee the truth, and that terrible mistakes can sometimes be at least partially atoned for-but this is a very sad story. Nonetheless, the ending offers hope for Blanca and a surprising posthumous redemption for desperate, doomed Sam. Achingly beautiful and filled with heart-wrenchingly real characters: one of Hoffman's best. Agent: Elaine Markson/Elaine Markson Literary Agency