Alice Hoffman - Here on Earth

Table of Contents

Hoffman conveys the mesmerizing lure of a lost love with haunting sensuality ... high drama ... assured and lyrical prose.

A Wuthering Heights... profound.

Her books unfold artfully without feeling fussed over or writing-workshopped to death ... [In] Here on Earth, she plumbs the interior lives of, among others, a drunken recluse, a heartsick teenage boy, an angry daughter, a near madman, a cuckolded husband, and three wounded women, with such modesty and skill that she seems to witness rather than invent their lives.

Its always a pleasure to read Hoffmans lyrical, luminous writing.

Hoffmans is a gentle kind of magic that exists quietly on the edge of our vision, changing and reordering small-town and suburban lives ... one of her most disturbing works ... Here on Earth will disappoint none of her fans, and proves again that to read Hoffman is to have ones life enriched immeasurably.

Hoffman takes great care here to examine the many facets of love and relationships... [Her] evocative language and her lyrical descriptions of place contrast sharply with the emotional scars that her characters must uncover and bear ... Highly recommended.

A good, old-fashioned love story... Alice Hoffmans writing at its precise and heartbreaking best.

A memorable novel.

An affecting love story, laced with humor.

A satisfying book, one that is hard to lay aside.

Magical and daring... very possibly her best.

Suspenseful ... a dark, romantic meditation on what it means to be human.

Hoffman tells a great story. Expect to finish this one in a single. guilty sitting.

Intelligent and absorbing... a celebration of the simple, unstinting grace of human love.

Generous, magical... Second Nature may be best read at full speed, hurtling down the mountain, as if falling in love.

Magnificent.

A spectacular novel.

Susan Isaacs, The Washington Post Book World

Hard to put down ... full of characters who take hold of your heart.

Beautiful.

She is a born storyteller... and Turtle Moon is one of her best.

A beautiful, moving book about the power of love and the desires of the heart.

Splendid... Practical Magic is one of her best novels, showing on every page her gift for touching ordinary life as if with a wand, to reveal how extraordinary life really is.

Written with a light hand and perfect rhythm... Practical Magic has the pace of a fairy tale but the impact of accomplished fiction.

[A] delicious fantasy of witchcraft and love in a world where gardens smell of lemon verbena and happy endings are possible. Cosmopolitan

Alice Hoffman takes seemingly ordinary lives and lets us see and feel extraordinary things.Amy Tan

Hoffman seems certain to join such writers as Anne Tyler and Mary Gordon... a major novelist.Newsweek

One of the brightest and most imaginative of contemporary writers.

Her touch is so light, her writing so luminous.

Her novels are as fluid and graceful as dreams.

Showing the magic that lies below the surface of everyday life is just what we hope for in a satisfying novel, and thats what Ms. Hoffman gives us every time.

A reader is in good hands with Ms. Hoffman, able to count on many pleasures. She is one of our quirkiest and most interesting novelists.

Jane Smiley, USA Today

With her glorious prose and extraordinary eye... Alice Hoffman seems to know what it means to be a human being.

Susan Isaacs, Newsday

PROPERTY OF
THE DROWNING SEASON
ANGEL LANDING
WHITE HORSES
FORTUNES DAUGHTER
ILLUMINATION NIGHT
AT RISK
SEVENTH HEAVEN
TURTLE MOON
SECOND NATURE
PRACTICAL MAGIC
HERE ON EARTH
LOCAL GIRLS
THE RIVER KING
BLUE DIARY

FIREFLIES
HORSEFLY
AQUAMARINE
INDIGO

To E.B.

Tonight, the hay in the fields is already brittle with frost, especially to the west of Fox Hill, where the pastures shine like stars. In October, darkness begins to settle by four-thirty and although the leaves have turned scarlet and gold, in the dark everything is a shadow of itself, gray with a purple edge. At this time of year, these woods are best avoided, or so the local boys say. Even the bravest among them wouldnt dare stray from the High Road after soccer practice at Fire-mens Field, and those who are old enough to stand beside the murky waters of Olive Tree Lake and pry kisses from their girlfriends still walk home quickly. If the truth be told, some of them run. A person could get lost up here. After enough wrong turns he might find himself in the Marshes, and once he was there, a man could wander forever among the minnows and the reeds, his soul struggling to find its way long after his bones had been discovered and buried on the crest of the hill, where wild blueberries grow.

People from out of town might be tempted to laugh at boys who believed in such things; they might go so far as to call them fools. And yet there are grown men who have lived in Jenkintown all their lives, and are afraid of very little in this world, who will not cross the hill after dark. Even the firefighters down at the station on Main Street, courageous volunteers who have twice been commended for heroism by the governor himself, are always relieved to discover that the fire bells are tolling for flames on Richdale or Seventh Streetany location thats not the hill is one worth getting to fast.

The town founder himself, Aaron Jenkins, a seventeen-year-old boy from Warwick, England, was the first to realize that some localities are accompanied by bad luck. Jenkins built his house in the Marshes in the year 1663. One October night, when the tide froze solid and refused to go back to sea. he received a message in his dreams that he must flee immediately or be trapped in the ice himself. He left what little he owned and ran over the hill, even though there was a terrible storm, with thunder just above his head and hailstones the size of apples. In his journal, exhibited in the reading room at the library, Aaron Jenkins vows that a thousand foxes followed on his heels. All the same, he didnt stop until he reached what is now the town square, where he built a new home, a neat, one-roomed house that is currently a visitors center where tourists from New York and Boston can pick up maps.