Book Review: So I discovered Alice Hoffman through Sarah Addison Allen. While reading up on Allen I found out that Hoffman had greatly influenced her work as a student. I found this facinating to say the least! It's funny, but not so far off the charts that I have been inspired by Sarah A. Allen! And Alice Hoffman! Both are great writers and both have a sense of weaving the known and the unknown together with such simplicity and yet with such intricacy that it is impossible to remove the characters from their situations.
In Second Nature Hoffman taps into the human instinct for chasing a mystery. The entire book is a mystery! From beginning to end she draws you in deeper and deeper until having to turn the page is an interruption! The story is seemless in its sense of rhythm; Hoffman takes you into the inner workings of human nature, its core, its baseness...there is a raw, wild and edgy quality to this novel that just grips you from beginning to end.
The tension she creates in and between her characters is so tangible that at the last page turn it was with a sense of sadness but also a sense of relief that I put this book down! Her characters are vivid, they are raw, they come out at you from the pages!
If you enjoy a good read this is definitely the book for you! It gave me chills and warmed me at the same time!
Book Synopsis: Beguiled by her seductive prose and her imaginative virtuosity, readers have always been willing to suspend disbelief and enjoy the touches of magic in Hoffman's novels ( Illumination Night ; Turtle Moon , etc). Here, credibility is stretched not by magical intervention but by the implausibility of a major character. When a feral young man is discovered living with wolves in a remote area of upper Michigan, he cannot speak and can barely remember his early life. Transferred to a hospital in Manhattan, he does not utter a sound and is on his way to being incarcerated in a mental institution until divorced landscape designer Robin Moore impulsively hustles him into her pickup truck and carries him to the sanctuary of her home on an island in Nassau County. There the Wolf Man reveals that his name is Stephen and that he was the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed his parents when he was three-and-a-half years old; thereafter he lived with a wolf pack. Within three months Robin teaches Stephen to read; soon afterwards they begin a passionate affair. How Stephen can so easily expand the small vocabulary he had mastered at a tender age but has never used since, how suddenly he can deal with sophisticated concepts, speak in grammatical sentences and even observe the social graces, is the central flaw that undermines what is otherwise a highly engaging tale. Stephen's presence in the community causes various people to reassess their lives; then there is a tragedy involving a child, (a device that is beginning to be a pattern in Hoffman's novels, as are strange changes in climate that herald a significant event). Hoffman's keen appraisal of human nature and her graceful prose do much to keep this novel appealing; but the bedrock implausibility may deter readers from whole-hearted enjoyment. Synopsis Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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