Places have much greater permanence than people. Land exists for eons (now don’t get picky about ocean fronts migrating and the Big Island expanding. You know what I mean) whereas people last mere generations, and often much less. On the surface at least, Blackbird House is a novel of place, in which the Blackbird House of the title is the stage, and each short story offers characters who play across it. There should be a name (and probably is, but I just do not know it, novel-in-stories or linked-stories maybe) for so-called novels that are comprised of linked short-stories. Maybe, as this one is about a house, it could be a building-roman. This is a form Hoffman employs rarely. Her later book, The Red Garden, does exactly the same thing, watching the lives that intersect a place over time. But she usually writes novels in a more traditional format.Hoffman is very easy to read. Her characters are interesting and engaging, and I almost always want her people to persist beyond the pages of their particular tale. Sometimes they cross from one story to the next, and it is always a wonderful thing. The Blackbird House of the title was built in 18th century Cape Cod, at a time when the British were enforcing a blockade. Many of the locals were seafaring folk, fishermen mostly. John Hadley, a fisherman, and builder of the Blackbird House, who had planned to live a safer existence as a farmer, is at sea with his two sons, hoping for one last, end-of-season haul, when a sudden storm erupts, leaving only one survivor. Well, one human survivor. Young Isaac had taken along a blackbird that he had raised from a chick, and that blackbird makes it back home. This being Alice Hoffman, the bird not only made it back, but had turned white, supposedly from having touched sea foam. And so it begins.Odd events take place in Hoffman’s magical universe. Pilot whales beach en masse, the voices of those not quite passed seem to be singing; a shipwreck survivor’s hands are marked by the copper bands of a barrel that had saved him, rumors of a serpent arise; the white blackbird puts in an appearance in every story, a stand-in for, or reminder of the title house, or maybe a reminder of an existential crisis for one of the characters, maybe just the spirit of the place; the color red seems to seep from the earth itself, a giant fish saves a shipwreck survivor, then takes payment by biting off one of the man’s legs. The man spits up fish teeth for the rest of his days. In other words, a typical Alice Hoffman magical, almost fairy-tale book. What fun!The stories traverse two hundred years, and touch on some of the darker sides of our history. A poor woman, seemingly targeted by God or nature for particularly harsh treatment, manages to survive, somewhat addled, and the townies see her as a witch, with the accompanying shunning. This is New England after all. As a summer resident of the Cape for 25 years by the time Blackbird House was published, Hoffman had a pretty good familiarity with the environment that informs her stories. This supported her tendency to ground this work with aspects of the land itself. In a relatively sere landscape, in which most local soil is not good for much, the land on which the Blackbird House sits stands out. Early on the property is planted with a pear tree that produces red fruit. Sweet peas and sweet turnips, planted in an early story feed characters in subsequent tales. Several characters manifest unusual, extreme connections to nature. One resident adds a bit of cannabis to the local flora, but that remains mostly out of sight in following tales. Several characters seem to have a rapport with the land that would make Tom Bombadil proud. Loss is a permanent resident. From the widow of the opening piece to Ruth, in The Witch of Truro, who loses her parents to smallpox and her home to fire, and in a later story her husband; love is sought, sometimes found, often lost. This collection of stories has enough instances of loss and subsequent salvation that it could easily have been titled Lost and Found on the Cape. These are mostly tales of strong women. A few male characters get their moments in the spotlight, but it is primarily a female’s stage. Having to overcome misfortune, having to struggle against nature, ignorance, fear, lost hope, these women struggle to survive, whether that means doing in an abusive spouse, shearing off locks to aid in disguising as a man and joining the army, taking up residence with a one-legged blacksmith just to have a roof over her head, battling cancer, enduring years of abuse, suffering with loneliness, struggling to gain the affection of a man. Hope does battle with despair.Hoffman offers a bit of mirroring in her front and back. The opening story has a 10-year old drowning at sea, and another young lad comes to a dark end in the final pages. This may have a root in Hoffman's personal experience. Hoffman bought an old Cape Cod house that was supposedly haunted by the ghost of a 10 year old who had drowned. During the writing of some of these stories, Hoffman was enduring chemo for cancer. In fact while she was being treated she met a neighbor, a girl, who was also being treated. That she incorporated into her story such earth-bound symbols of regeneration, the pear tree, the turnips, seems like no accident in light of that. Nor do the repeated struggles with misfortune that her characters endure.Alice Hoffman has written many wonderful novels. Whether one considers this a true novel or some other form of literature, The Blackbird House is an engaging, fascinating and satisfying read, combining the grounding of earth with flight of fantasy, in short, the work of a master of her craft.
Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman: 3.5 starsBlackbird House was an intriguing book whose main character happens to be a house, rather than a person. The book follows the inhabitants of the house from the 1700's in Cape Cod all the way to the present day, and each new family that lived there brings a new added history to the house's legacy.The first chapter (or vignette) was, in my opinion, the best of the book by far. This chapter is about the first inhabitants of the Blackbird House, a man John Hadley and his wife Coral along with their two sons Isaac and Vincent. The youngest son Isaac, who is ten years old, found a baby blackbird and decided to keep it and tame it to be his pet. Isaac eventually becomes very attached to his bird and never parts with it. When the fishing season comes, John decides to take both of his sons out to sea one last time before he retires from fishing and devotes himself to his farm. However, out in sea a terrible storm erupts and destroys the boat, killing Isaac and John, while Vincent was barley able to escape. In the moments before his death, Isaac threw his blackbird into the sky, saving his best friends life. When Coral hears the news of this great tragedy, she refuses to believe that John is dead, and she refueses to believe it even decades after the event. The only reminder of her family was the blackbird who had miraculously made its way back home (but now had white feathers) and haunted Coral ever since. The blackbird is found in nearly every chapter after this, and the people who live there are never sure if it is just a myth or a blackbird really is haunting there home.The later chapters are written very well, but I never could connect to a single character as much as I connected with Isaac. These other families stories are all interesting to read, some are sad and some are just devastating but almost none of them are truly happy, which gets rather depressing after reading two centuries of gloom and misery. However, the book made a nice read, and I did not find it at all strange or disorienting that the characters changed every chapter because I know that the book is less about the characters than it is about the house itself.(Originally posted on: http://damianobookreviews.blogspot.com)
What do You think about Blackbird House (2005)?
Blackbird House is a beautiful book written in the lyrical style that is so uniquely Alice Hoffman. Despite actually being comprised of a collection of short stories, it reads more like a novel, with a setting that is as haunted as it is beautiful. Each story is set on the same Cape Cod farm near the sea and the collection takes place across the span of over 200 years. The first story tells of the farm's first inhabitants, the fisherman John Hadley, who builds Blackbird House from the boards of shipwrecked vessels during the Revolutionary War. With this story comes the first tragedy of the land and ghosts that will remain throughout the years. Each story that follows is about love, loss, secrets, and lessons, and the imprints that life can leave on a location. The characters are each unique and the language used in this book is simply beautiful. Although I loved each story, my favorite was "The Token" as it was so dark, yet whimsical; tragic, yet endearing--which can actually be used to describe Blackbird House as a whole as well.
—Cari
In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the characters we meet: Violet, a brilliant girl who is in love with books and with a man destined to betray her; Lysander Wynn, attacked by a halibut as big as a horse, certain that his life is ruined until a boarder wearing red boots arrives to change everything; Maya Cooper, who does not understand the true meaning of the love between her mother and father until it is nearly too late. From the time of the British occupation of Massachusetts to our own modern world, family after family’s lives are inexorably changed, not only by the people they love but by the lives they lead inside Blackbird House. These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one lasting element in our lives. The past both dissipates and remains contained inside the rooms of Blackbird House, where there are terrible secrets, inspired beauty, and, above all else, a spirit of coming home
—Josephine Merkle
Yes, it's The Red Garden. I finally stopped being lazy and looked it up. Looking forward to it. No, haven't read HOE. But I'll get to them all eventually.
—Tressa
