![]() When he dies in Europe years later, Violet brings home his son to raise. ![]() ![]() The oldest, unaware of his paternity, wins a scholarship to Harvard and leaves Cape Cod. Violet marries a good man and happily raises three children on the farm. She falls in love with a visiting Harvard professor who ends up marrying her prettier sister-but not before impregnating Violet. At the center, three interlocking stories follow Violet, a bookish farm girl. ![]() These stories lean heavily on symbolism-fire, water, the color red, a white blackbird-but Hoffman has grown in subtlety, so that the recurring motifs and occasionally heightened realism work nicely within the book’s structure. When Ruth’s husband dies years later, her daughter buries “The Token” to help her recover. “The Witch of Truro” is actually Ruth, a desperate orphan who finds love and security with a kindly one-legged blacksmith on the farm. With a dozen stories, some more clearly connected than others but all set in the same farmhouse on Cape Cod from the time of the British blockade to the present, Hoffman ( Blue Diary, 2002, etc.) creates a continuous narrative built up through a sense of place.īlackbird House was built “On the Edge of the World” by a fisherman lost, along with his younger son, during what he’d hoped was to be his last sea voyage before settling down to farm. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |