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Ok, so I got 2/3 through, then skipped about 65 pages to read the last 35. So glad I didn't waste more time on it. This book follows several main characters, but the primary heroine got on my last nerve, and some of the others weren't so great, either. And despite Alice Hoffman's good reputation as a writer, I actually couldn't stand her writing style. It would jump perspectives really quickly and thus felt unnatural, and it was generally over-the-top.

Update: I've just looked over some reviews, and supposedly this is a modern retelling of Wuthering Heights. No wonder I hated this one, then, because I can't stand Wuthering Heights.

My main problems with this book?
Cheating, incest, and domestic abuse. And this is a bestselling book??? You've got to be kidding me.

The main idea of this story is about a girl who goes back to her home town with her daughter and falls back in love with her childhood sweetheart who's not very sweet. She left her husband and ended everything good in her life for this man. She learns her lesson and leaves before it's too late. That's all. This book took almost halfway to actually get into. Once you do get into it, you read and you read and then the climax comes and there's some sort of closing. It's the way 99% of books are written. Well the ones I have read. This one is part of the one percent. It had it's closing before the climax. Although I enjoyed the bad man getting killed, that was literally on the second to last page and then the book ends. I feel like there was no closing. That's what I get for not judging a book by it's cover. I think that cover looks boring and it turns out the book was to. I have read another book, I just wish my reading skills weren't wasted from something I didn't enjoy and didn't learn anything from. Blah to this book!

Alice Hoffman, viime vuoden ihastukseni, aloitin lukemaan kirjojasi alusta loppuun.

Here on Earth, suom. Kerttumäki, oli tavallaan tuttu ja kiehtova, tavallaan taas ei.

Aina kun joku saa minut uppoamaan tilaan, paikkaan tai miljööseen, olen ihan myyty. Alice H on aivan huippu pikkukaupunkikuvaaja. Kun luen näitä, alan heti selailla asuntoilmoituksia, vaikka se ei ehkä ollut Hoffmanin tarkoitus.

Kettumäessä maaginen realismi on nupussaan.

Tarina on ensin kiinnostavan henkilökohtainen, sitten tylsän viihdesarjamainen, ja lopuksi draaman kaari oli hallussa. Jos haluat tietää jotain muuta juonesta, kyse on manipulaatiosta ja pakkomielteistä. Olen ymmärränyt, että myös Brönte E:n Humisevasta harjusta, mutta ei kai sentään...

Ei millään tavalla parasta Hoffmania, mutta ei huonokaan. Uskon, että tämä toimisi erittäin hyvin sarjana ja kukapa muu olisikaan pääosassa kuin Nicole Kidman.

Alice Hoffman can’t resist the incestuous subplot I guess ?

Horrible novel- how'd it make it on Oprah's list? Hoffman spent so much time trying to align the plot to "Wuthering Heights" that she forgot to be original and make the story her own. The result is a perversion of Emily Bronte's tale that completely misses the point. [return][return]March travels back to her hometown with her teen daughter Gwen for the funeral of her Nelly Dean-esque housekeeper. There, she meets up with Hollis, her childhood love that got away. The renew their love, but Hollis is bent on revenge and abuses her physically, emotionally, and sexually. Meanwhile Gwen finds romance with her Hareton, and all find themselves caught in Hollis' sick trap. There is no redemption for any of the characters; the survivors are only lucky to have escaped -- a denouement with the character development worthy of a Vincent Price film.[return][return]Hoffman just doesn't get it- what makes the reader fall for Heathcliff despite his tyrannical ways is his undying passion for Catherine. He can abuse Isabella and trap young Catherine Linton into a loveless marriage, but the sheer force of his passion for his Catherine blows it all away. Hollis has no such passion for March. He is only fueled on revenge. Besides the physical abuse, Hollis cheats on March once he has her, completely disregarding any notion that he may actually love or feel passion for her. Hoffman seems to have confused passion with rape. Their romantic scenes read like the worse bodice ripper. To complete the characterization of Hollis, Hoffman should have given him a long Snidely Whiplash mustache to twirl.[return] [return]Instead of spending so much time trying to get the characters to fit their "Wuthering Heights" mold so closely, Hoffman should have instead used the novel as a guide for exploring the relationships in her story. A more talented author could have made the distinction between healthy love and obsessive love without playing a game of "How perverted can I make this guy?" In fact, a more talented author did, and Hoffman was way over her head meddling with Bronte. As is, her treatment of March, and March's acceptance of it, is downright misogynistic and Hoffman should have known better, as should have Oprah.

DNF at page 38.

This is a modern version of Wuthering Heights. I liked Wuthering Heights but I didn't love it. I'm glad I read it because it is a different classic, and a different romance. The fact that I buddy read it helped a lot. Now, I don't think I can't go through this again. I disliked every minute I spent with this book. This is the second book I tried by Alice Hoffman and the second I DNF. Maybe she is not my type of author. I still have some by her in my TBR. Let's see.

i may have become a snob after reading so many important books in the past three years,but this writing is terrible. if i were to count the cliches hoffman uses ,i wouldn t be able to follow the narrative. after i read that she was imitating WURTHERING HEIGHTS, i decided i had a duty to finish the book which i had thrown down in disgust after reading page 213. read my other posts to see what happened there. charles dickens got away with melodrama so i guess we can excuse a contemporary writer for doing the same. i have a copy of her LOCAL GIRLS which i may read cause i feel i should read books i own. i confess that when i bought both of her books,i thought i was buying an alice walker book. i have trouble with concentration..lol. i read her TURTLE MOON years before i became a reading snob and remember little about it except i think it moved me abit. what to read next ? i am away from my library and may have to read my son s college lit book to pass our remaining time here i come..w.b. yeats,t.s. eliot, ..happy reading,joe.

This booked completely sucked me in; I felt like I was living inside of it every time I started reading. This is the first book by Alice Hoffman that I've read and I look forward to many more. I found myself so invested in the story. The characters and the town were created with such beautiful description that even when I hated a person or an event, I found the way it was written too beautiful to be angry with. I reread so many sentences because they just sounded so lovely. I absolutely loved reading this book!

fulfilling book riot's 2018 read harder challenge task #13: an oprah book club selection

extry points given to me, by me, for choosing a book that i have owned for more than a year.

it has been a long time since i have given a book a two-star rating, but this book earned it.



i’m not someone who takes delight in negativity, and even if i’m not in love with a book, i’m usually able to find something neutral and deflecting to say about it, or at the very least, i'm able to suggest the correct audience for it, in that “people who enjoy ___ will find much to appreciate in this book &yadda" way.

this time, though, i’m at a loss.

it tells a clear, if psychologically unrealistic, story, it has distinct characters and dialogue that is competently written and the shape of it meets all of the criteria for “how a novel is structured,” so it deserves more than a single star, but i did not enjoy reading it. nor can i come up with a profile of the reader who would enjoy it, even though, clearly, people have. and do. people who are oprah and people who are not oprah.

it’s been on my radar for a while, because i'll read any retelling of wuthering heights. many most of them are not good, but they’re not good in ways that were easy-to-predict from their précis: shoehorning in a bunch of erotic scenes or costuming heathcliff as a rock star or a vampire isn’t going to improve upon the original - sex is sex is sex, after all, and you can read about it anywhere, and heathcliff doesn’t suddenly become more charismatic or predatory by giving him pointy teeth or a guitar. heathcliff has so often been the inspiration for antiheroic male leads, including vampires and rock stars, that turning literal heathcliff into a literal vampire feels unnecessary and derivative.

but i get why you'd try. wuthering heights is deliciously complicated and tempestuous and it's full of shitty people being shitty to each other and scorching the earth until pretty much everyone's left broken or dead, and what's more fun than unrestrained melodrama? but this is just...blah. it doesn't use the characters or the situation to any real advantage. it's as though by using WH as its jumping-off point, it can just shorthand its own central relationship, which lies flat on the page, not earning its own tragedy, seeming to assume the reader is filling in the emotional gaps with whatever bronte-borrowed intensity is showing through its cracks.

hoffman keeps the basic framework of wuthering heights, translating the tone into contemporary smalltown realism with these occasional outbursts of gothic melodrama, which is confusing and pleasing to no one. meanwhile, so much of what makes wh work is left out entirely, and you're left with such a pale version of the original it's no wonder so many readers missed the connection entirely.

i have questions and complaints, and in order to vent about them, i'm going to need to discuss the plots of both wuthering heights and here on earth, so if you want those books to keep their secrets, stop reading this review right here.

these questions and complaints will be scattershot and underexplicated; i'm typing as they occur to me, but since it's likely that no one's reading past this point anyway, i can do what i waaaant.

most of the problems i have with this book can be summed up as: who does that?

march murray (catherine earnshaw) is 11 years old when her father goes to boston for a conference and returns with a 13-year-old orphan named hollis (heathcliff). her twenty-one-year old brother alan (hindley) declares, “He found him wandering the streets or something.” no further information is given. pause to reflect that what works in a novel set in 18th century rural england does not necessarily work in modern-day america, where you can’t really just grab a kid off the city streets and take him home without some kinda paperwork.

to repeat, alan/hindley is twenty-one. a grown-ass man, who has finished college in a desultory fashion, and is living at home, taking some law classes, in as desultory a way as undergrad, super-disappointing to his dad, who definitely likes his new pet urchin more than alan. which makes alan resentful, sure, but he behaves like a child:

Alan took every opportunity to humiliate Hollis. In public, he treated Hollis as though he were a servant; at home he made certain the boy knew he was an outcast. Often, Alan would sneak into Hollis’ room, where he’d do as much damage as possible. He poured calves’ blood into Hollis’s bureau drawers, ruining Hollis’s limited wardrobe, knowing full well Hollis would rather wear the same clothes every day than admit defeat. He left a pile of cow manure in the closet, and by the time Hollis figured out where the stench was coming from, everything Henry Murray had given him, the books and the lamps and the blankets, had been contaminated by the smell.

and then, later, alan and his similarly-aged pals beat hollis up, and tie him to a tree in the snowy middle of winter, leaving him there for hours until march finds him and frees him. a gaggle of adult men beating up a 13-year-old boy because one of 'em's jelly that his daddy kidnapped a runaway and loves him more.

usual wh bits follow - march and hollis hit it off, go wilding together, spy on the wealthy neighbors, have more explicit intercourse than is mentioned in wuthering heights, daddy kiddiestealer dies, alan kicks hollis up to the attic, starts charging him backrent and such, hollis leaves for three years, but before he returns, fortune made, ready to take his revenge on everyone, march marries fancy next-door-neighbor richard and moves to california, where she has a daughter named gwen, and they all stay put there for nineteen years. which is different from how wh plays out.

why is this important? because march does not return home during all that time, even though many of the other events of wh do repeat here; events that would cause a normal person to buy a plane ticket: hollis marries richard's sister, they have a kid, wife and kid both die. alan has a wife and a kid, wife dies, hollis takes kid and raises him as ward (in a much less evil way than heathcliff raised hareton). and none of those deaths or "nephew being raised by former lover/adopted brother" cause march to come home. but when this book's nelly dean dies, off goes march, leaving richard at home, but taking their teenage daughter in tow, to settle her affairs and oopsie-whoopsie - resume her affair with hollis. who has naturally been waiting for her all this time, but has also bedded all the local ladies because he's dreamy and rich and a man has needs.

march is in no way a catherine. she's got no spark, no cruelty, not enough to withstand hollis' douchiness. after some pretty unconvincing resistance, march goes full-bore back into hollis’ arms, with no sense of discretion - in full view of the gossipy townsfolk, her rivals for hollis’ backseat affections, and her fifteen-year-old daughter, who's trying to deflect he father's frequent calls and even when he finds out, he's way more chill about it than he ought to be.

the hollis/march thang very quickly turns from “all-consuming greedy passion” to “super controlling and abusive,” and march becomes this sleepwalker, drifting through town in clothes from the goodwill, pale and scrawny and neglecting her self-care and her daughter, who finds her own distraction with hollis' adopted son hank, which you will recall is alan's son, so her own first cousin. which relationship march is fully aware but recklessly uncaring of taboo as she loses more and more of herself to increasingly violent intercourse and jealous rages from hollis, who's still sleeping with other women. none of this is anything like the dynamic in withering heights, and it's all very tedious. so much is glossed over - march and gwen were supposed to be there for two weeks and then suddenly months have passed and gwen is enrolled in school there and how much did they even pack for this?

and gwen and hank are totally overwhelmed by the situation. less so the "we're cousins" part, more just the march-and-hollis boning part. sure, hollis is a jerk and march is letting herself go to seed and everything's a mess, but they seem to be taking on all the melodrama that really should be more evenly distributed throughout the rest of the story.

They sit in silence, at two in the morning, as if they were an old married couple, drinking coffee and holding hands. They’re trapped by circumstance. They can feel their situation chipping away at what they might have had.

that seems more tragic than it needs to be.

On this night...they don't talk about how their future is unraveling; they don't think about all they have to lose. They go into that small bedroom off the kitchen and curl up together on the single bed, on top of the woolen blanket, arms entwined. If she could, Gwen would whisper that she loved him. If he could, he would vow that everything would turn out right. But that's not the way things are now, and they both know it. That's not the way things are at all.

i mean, really. be normal teenagers and don't let your parents' affair get in the way of your own intercourse.

i dunno - i had a lot of problems with this one. the hollis/march connection didn't seem strongly developed enough in their youth to set in motion this whole cannonball, it changed the whole point of wuthering heights to have it be some lifetime movie version about a woman too consumed by her love of a man who smells like sulphur (i mean, really...) to acknowledge her own abuse - this is not my wuthering heights.

i knew i should have read Ruby

come to my blog!

If you are considering suicide, this is the book that will push you over the edge. The key themes are hopelessness, bleakness, oppression, passive-aggression and infidelity. Besides, it is a complete copy of Wuthering Heights, set in the USA in 1980. Skip it.

Pretty good book