From 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.)
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From
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
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