I usually enjoy Alice Hoffman's books, but I just didn't understand this book. I didn't get attached to the characters, and I did not understand why she switched into the second person randomly towards the end. Also, the ending made little sense.

This short and lovely book is almost a series of linked stories, almost an episodic tale, yet in the end still a novel of family life, leavened with the wild, negative, generative power of adolescence, the yawning dark fear of marriage and parenting, the quiet dissolution of age, the heartbreaking loneliness of being difference, and the magic of any of these states in extremity. Is there a truer description of the inner life of a teenage girl--her absolute obsessiveness, her calculations, her energy bordering on incantation, her drive to launch herself and her utter lack of interest in anything but her own drives? Or of the state of agorophobia, tangled with mother-love and old anxieties and the woes of a marriage a few years on? Is there anything more achingly sympathetic than a man who has withdrawn from the world, knowing that his outward being is too different to be unremarked, but who aches and aches for love? This is why we read, I think.

one of my favorite alice hoffman books, aside from "the river king". her old stuff is soooooooo much better than the new.

so. much. better.

anyhow, it takes place on the vineyard, which was excellent, becuase i could picture everything in my brain. also, her imagery and prose is aMAZing; it's like one really long poem, rahter than a novel. the characers are facinating too--they are flawed, but you love them, and you hurt for them, and you wish they were actual people that lived next door. and then you cry when everyone is redeemed, but not in a squishy-free love sort of way. in a real way.

p.s. sometimes i get way too into books.

anyhow, it has hoffman's signature mystical aura, but unlike her later works, it kind of takes a back seat to the character development. i loved it, and will read it again.

fin.

Hmm...this wasn't my favorite Alice Hoffman book that I've read - I liked that it had her fantasical elements, but I thought she started out normal and good and then took too many weird turns.

Illumination Night by Alice Hoffman struck me as a bit of a hodge-podge dressed up in a sort of mysticism that asks us to forgive the whole mess underneath. There is some good writing and there are some interesting stories, including that of the fleeting passion between a married man in his thirties and a visiting teenage girl who falls for him at first sight and pursues him relentlessly, and that of a fully grown daughter who goes to see her wealthy father in a time of financial need only to be totally rejected on every level. Her subsequent breakdown is completely believable and gripping, but then the fabulous takes over and many of the character become archetypes out of fables, and the overall effect is rather tedious.

Awful

So boring. The storyline was non-existent. The characters were all jerks and completely shallow. I'll never read another by her.

I have not read many of this author's work but I do find her stories interesting. This one is set on Long Island, New York and involves a small family who are affected by the young woman who moves in next door and becomes obsessed by the husband. The wife becomes aware of the relationship and subsequently becomes agoraphobic, a condition which is well described here.

Andre and Vonnie are struggling to make ends meet while raising their young son, Simon. Little do they know however, how much their lives will change when their elderly neighbor, Elizabeth decides she can fly and falls from her roof. This event sets in motion the arrival of Jody, Elizabeth's granddaughter, who is banished to the small town by her mother, to take care of grandma. Jody is a teenager with plenty of oats to sow, and quickly sets her eyes on Andre, well just because she thinks she can do whatever she feels like.

As the chaos heats up between Andre and Jody, Vonnie is stricken with severe panic attacks. She can't leave the house and spends hours a day driving her truck up and down the muddy driveway desperately trying to break through her imaginary bubble. Adorable little Simon, is trapped between the comings and goings of all of the adults.

Alice Hoffman does a great job of developing a diverse cast of characters and weaving their actions together. I enjoyed this book for the most part. The one thing that bugged me however, is why the title was Illumination Night. The lighting of lanterns played a very small part in the story. And I didn't feel that any of the characters found "illumination" by the end. Only Jody moved on, every one else simply moved back into a pre existing comfort zone.

Illumination Night is not my favorite Alice Hoffman novel but it's high on the list and worth the time I invested in it.

I liked this story enough for it to hold my interest but the whole time I kept feeling like there was something missing but maybe that is the point of it. Most of us live our lives feeling like something is missing or off and few of us ever figure out what that something is. The setting of this story is Martha's Vineyard. The characters all lead fairly normal but simple lives until Jody moves in next door to help her ailing grandmother. She stirs things up enough to add interest and some drama to the characters lives and then she slips away to pursue a more freeing kind of life...or so we assume.

I have enjoyed a lot of other Alice Hoffman books but this was very slow and had no real plot line. I was very bored the entire time. She is a beautiful writer, with some good insight to human lives but the book isn’t much of a story at all.

One thing that's always of paramount importance to me is that I like the characters. I did. Or, at least, I cared what happened to them.
The story is a couple of years in the lives of a few families on Martha's Vineyard. It feels very 1950s to me, although there isn't a specific time mentioned. While I mostly enjoyed reading it, when it was over I thought: "Why?" While characters go through changes, those changes ultimately don't make much of a difference. They're also not fully fleshed and investigated. They just ... happen. And, yet, I was glad for the resolutions.
Not a great book - but not a bad one either.
[NOTE: Other than seeing the movie "Practical Magic", this is my first Alice Hoffman.]

Love this author and her writing style. Less mystical than some of her works, this book addresses serious issues including anxiety disorder.
"Elizabeth Renny has only made two decisions of consequence in her seventy-plus years. While the first, marrying her husband, had adequate results, the second—deciding she could fly from her bedroom window—is less successful. But her flight sets in motion a series of events that will forever change the lives of six residents of Martha’s Vineyard: a young boy who refuses to grow, a wife stifled by her irrational anxiety, a husband tempted by the unknown, a girl flirting with disaster, a gentle giant tortured by his size, and an old woman with nothing to lose.
Praised as “an intelligent novel” by the New York Times and “achingly vivid” by Newsday, Illumination Night is a sparkling and heartbreaking narrative that explores marriage, friendship, youth, yearning, disillusionment, and desire, a book as bright and memorable as the festival of lanterns for which it is named." synopsis copied
My only criticism, I wanted the book to go on.