“Blackbird House”

On Cape Cod sits a white house surrounded by Massachusetts vegetation and farm land. It could be any New England home, but if you look closely this home is the setting for Alice Hoffman's newest book, Blackbird House. Blackbird House is a series of interconnected short stories. While they can surely be read one at a time, if they are read together loosely as a novel they will provide most readers with another. Every sense is awakened as one digests her flowing words. We feel her characters joys and losses, revel in her descriptions of nature and animals and hope for a good outcome for her characters lives as they unfold before our eyes. With the house as a backdrop and one of her most endearing characters, Ms. Hoffman provides her readers with pages filled with unusual people, magical places and events which challenge the emotions of the human heart. So entranced was I by some of the passages and stories, I was forced to close the book for a few minutes and take deep breaths before I could go on to read more..

As we read we come to learn of the history of Blackbird House from over 200 years ago. We first meet the builder of the house John Hadley, a fisherman during Revolutionary times who builds the house as a monument to the endearing love he has for his wife. When he goes off to sea with his two young sons, a blackbird, the youngest son's pet accompanies them and returns to the house now totally white after disaster strikes. This blackbird and its other white descendants seem to hover around the house at other times during the tales as if a witness to everything which happens both to the hoses and the people who occupy it. In another story we meet Lysander who lost his leg to a giant halibut but finds love