Red Garden (Hoffman)

The Red Garden 
Alice Hoffman, 2011
Crown Publishing
270 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307405975


Summary
The Red Garden introduces us to the luminous and haunting world of Blackwell, Massachusetts, capturing the unexpected turns in its history and in our own lives.

In exquisite prose, Hoffman offers a transforming glimpse of small-town America, presenting us with some three hundred years of passion, dark secrets, loyalty, and redemption in a web of tales where characters' lives are intertwined by fate and by their own actions.

From the town's founder, a brave young woman from England who has no fear of blizzards or bears, to the young man who runs away to New York City with only his dog for company, the characters in The Red Garden are extraordinary and vivid: a young wounded Civil War soldier who is saved by a passionate neighbor, a woman who meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet who falls in love with a blind man, a mysterious traveler who comes to town in the year when summer never arrives.

At the center of everyone’s life is a mysterious garden where only red plants can grow, and where the truth can be found by those who dare to look.

Beautifully crafted, shimmering with magic, The Red Garden is as unforgettable as it is moving. (From the publisher.)

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About the Author 
• Birth—March 16, 1952
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Adelphi Univ.; M.A., Stanford Univ.
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts

Born in the 1950s to college-educated parents who divorced when she was young, Alice Hoffman was raised by her single, working mother in a blue-collar Long Island neighborhood. Although she felt like an outsider growing up, she discovered that these feelings of not quite belonging positioned her uniquely to observe people from a distance. Later, she would hone this viewpoint in stories that captured the full intensity of the human experience.

After high school, Hoffman went to work for the Doubleday factory in Garden City. But the eight-hour, supervised workday was not for her, and she quit before lunch on her first day! She enrolled in night school at Adelphi University, graduating in 1971 with a degree in English. She went on to attend Stanford University's Creative Writing Center on a Mirrellees Fellowship. Her mentor at Stanford, the great teacher and novelist Albert Guerard, helped to get her first story published in the literary magazine Fiction. The story attracted the attention of legendary editor Ted Solotaroff, who asked if she had written any longer fiction. She hadn't — but immediately set to work. In 1977, when Hoffman was 25, her first novel, Property Of, was published to great fanfare.

Since that remarkable debut, Hoffman has carved herself a unique niche in American fiction. A favorite with teens as well as adults, she renders life's deepest mysteries immediately understandable in stories suffused with magic realism and a dreamy, fairy-tale sensibility. (In a 1994 article for the New York Times, interviewer Ruth Reichl described the magic in Hoffman's books as a casual, regular occurrence — "...so offhand that even the most skeptical reader can accept it.") Her characters' lives are transformed by uncontrollable forces — love and loss, sorrow and bliss, danger and death.

Hoffman's 1997 novel Here on Earth was selected as an Oprah Book Club pick, but even without Winfrey's powerful endorsement, her books have become huge bestsellers — including three that have been adapted for the movies: Practical Magic (1995), The River King (2000), and her YA fable Aquamarine (2001).

Hoffman is a breast cancer survivor; and like many people who consider themselves blessed with luck, she believes strongly in giving back. For this reason, she donated her advance from her 1999 short story collection Local Girls to help create the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA

Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:

• Hoffman has written a number of children's books, including Fireflies: A Winter's Tale (1999), Horsefly (2000), and Moondog (2004).

• Aquamarine was written for Hoffman's best friend, Jo Ann, who dreamed of the freedom of mermaids as she battled brain cancer.

• Here on Earth is a modern version of Hoffman's favorite novel, Wuthering Heights.

• Hoffman has been honored with the Massachusetts Book Award for her teen novel Incantation.

• When asked what books most influenced her life or career, here's what she said:

Edward Eager's brilliant series of suburban magic: Half Magic, Magic by the Lake, Magic or Not, Knight's Castle, The Time Garden, Seven-Day Magic, The Well Wishers. Anything by Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, J. D. Salinger, Grace Paley. My favorite book: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews
Hoffman has developed her own brand of magical realism. Lulling and thought-provoking, she conjures soothing places where readers, like the children to whom we tell fairy tales, can learn with pleasure…"A story can still entrance people even while the world is falling apart," Hoffman writes in "The Fisherman's Wife," a story about gossip during the Depression. These tall tales, with their tight, soft focus on America, cast their own spell.
Anne Trubek - Washington Post


Hoffman brings us 200 years in the history of Blackwell, a small town in rural Massachusetts, in her insightful latest.... The result is a certain ethereal detachment as Hoffman's deft magical realism ties one woman's story to the next even when they themselves are not aware of the connection. The prose is beautiful, the characters drawn sparsely but with great compassion.
Publishers Weekly


This collection of interrelated stories from the talented Hoffman chronicles the 300-year history of Blackwell, MA, a mythical town tucked deep in the Berkshire Mountains.... Hoffman has done it again, crafting a poignant, compelling collection of fairy tales suffused with pathos and brightened by flashes of magic. Her fans, as well as those of magical realism in general, will be enchanted. —Jeanne Bogino, New Lebanon Lib., NY
Library Journal


According to the critics, The Red Garden is among Alice Hoffman’s recent best. She can occasionally be melodramatic, her stories overrun by fairy tale syntax. Although the magical abounds here—women become eels—there is little, if anything, that is overdone.
Bookmarks Magazine


(Starred review.) In gloriously sensuous, suspenseful, mystical, tragic, and redemptive episodes, Hoffman subtly alters her language, from an almost biblical voice to increasingly nuanced and intricate prose reflecting the burgeoning social and psychological complexities her passionate and searching characters face in an ever-changing world. —Donna Seaman
Booklist


In 14 freestanding but consecutive stories, Hoffman traces the life of the town of Blackwell, Mass., from its founding in 1750 up to the present as the founders' descendents connect to the land and each other.... Fans of Hoffman's brand of mystical whimsy will find this paean to New England one of her most satisfying.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Red Garden:

1. What is the symbolic significance of the red garden at the center of this collection of stories? And why red? What are all the permutations of the color red which turn up in this story (e.g., the Boston Red Sox on tv)?

2. In its review of Hoffman's book, BookPage says that the author "manages to communicate a yearning interpretation of the life we all live...." What is the yearning that's referred to in the review? How does Hoffman use magical realism to examine yearning, open it up, or fulfill it? How is yearning evidenced in The Red Garden? Or another question:  why does Hoffman use magical realism in this novel? What does she use it to express?

3. Consider the town of Blackwell as a character. How is it fleshed out in the book—describe the town's characteristics and the ethos of those who live there, present and past. How does it change over time?

4. What are some of the themes that tie these stories together—the central ideas they share with one another or that are carried from one story to another? Consider, say, love and loss, or connection of the present with the past. How are those—and other—ideas developed?

5. Follow-up to Question 4: What is the idea behind the bear? And how is the idea of the bear transformed, by time and repetition, so that when it's finally uncovered, it has attained a different, larger significance than it had in the initial story?

6. Ghosts play a recurring role in these stories. Explain their presence in each story...and the reasons Hoffman might be using them? What is she getting at?

7. At one point, in the first story, Hallie often "gazed out the window, as if there was someplace she wanted to be, some other life that was more worth living." What makes Hallie long for a different life? Do you ever have a desire similar to Hallie's? What life do you long for?

8. Many of the stories are concerned with the human connection to the natural world. How would you describe that relationship, how does it change over time in this book? Or does it change?

9. What about Hoffman's blending of fictional characters with real historical figures—the appearance of Emily Dickenson and Johnny Appleseed. Why might she have incorporated them into her story? For what purpose?

10. Of the 14 stories, which story do you like most? Which do you find most intriguing ... or magical ... or moving? Do any disappoint you?

11. Alice Hoffman has always been hailed as a remarkable prose stylist. What passages of particular beauty, or keen insight, struck you as you read this book?

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