The Story sisters

Review by New York Times Review

IN Alice Huffman's new novel, three long-haired sisters are stolen from their "faerie" family by mortals, stripped of their magic and given a false name. I could be wrong about that. That could be just a story the eldest sister tells her siblings. They're imaginative, these three. They make up an enchanted world they call Arnelle and have their own language, Arnish, which looks a little like the Italian a Tolkien elf might speak after a year in Rome: Quell me mora. ("Don't ask questions.") The girls live with their flummoxed, suffering mother, Annie, in a big old house on Long Island with an ancient hawthorn tree in the garden, along with a birdbath and "tremulous, prickly cucumber vines." Annie wants to protect her daughters from things that go bump in the night, but what she doesn't know is that "the worst had already happened" to the oldest girl, Elv, during the summer when she was 11. The fantasy world of Arnelle was born of this trauma. "It was a fairy tale in reverse," Elv explains. "The good and the kind lived in the otherworld, down twisted lanes, in the woods where trout lilies grew. True evil could be found walking down Nightingale Lane." Of course, the girls' real life is a bit of a fairy tale too. Their grandparents live on 89th Street in Manhattan but keep an apartment in the Marais district of Paris. "All their friends from New York and Paris" attend their 50th-anniversary party at the Plaza. The sisters have been to the Louvre and enjoy espresso and French ice cream. They are "diligent, beautiful girls, well-behaved, thoughtful." They prefer to share a room. The true hobgoblin of youth - hormones - strikes, and Elv starts wearing black and slamming doors. Her family watches, unable to get through to her, as she transforms into something unfamiliar. A demon. Or a teenager. "Some girls were in danger of vanishing just as children in fairy tales disappeared " Hoffman writes, "out the door, under the hedge, never to be found again." Hoffman has a child's dreamy eye, in the best possible sense. To her, the stuff grown-ups don't see anymore looms huge and important - insects banging on windowpanes, thunderstorms, a chestnut tree with a door to the "otherworld." She invents a realm where that sense of the fictive doesn't go away, where imagination and reality bleed together. But "The Story Sisters" itself is not a fairy tale. The characters in fairy tales are all good or all bad, and Hoffman's characters are always moving back and forth, challenging our perceptions, daring us to judge them. Her sentences tremble with allegory; nothing in this novel is ever as it appears - or is it? As Elv becomes more troubled, she retreats farther into the world of Arnelle, and farther away from her sisters. Even the girls' last name, Story, is whimsical, lending heft to Elv's theory that they were renamed by mortal kidnappers - we mortals being so maddeningly literal. The last act grows a bit histrionic and narrative strands are over-tangled, then too neatly tied up, but Hoffman's writing is so lovely and her female characters so appealing that it almost doesn't matter. In the end, "The Story Sisters," for all its magic realism, is about a family navigating through motherhood, sisterhood, daughterhood. It's "Little Women" on mushrooms. (Bookish sisters beware.) I can't wait to read it in Arnish. Chelsea Cain's latest novel, "Evil at Heart," will be published in September.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* A writer as virtuosic as Hoffman doesn't bestow the name Story on a family lightly. So, yes, this is a many-storied novel about storytellers, brimming with magic and despair, atonement and redemption. The Story sisters, Elv, Meg, and Claire, are dark-haired beauties clustered in the attic of their old Long Island house, while their lonely mother broods below. Their all-female household, a sly variation on Little Women, is under a grim fairy-tale spell, and not even sojourns with their fairy-godmother-like grandmother in Paris can protect them. As always in Hoffman's glimmering universe, nature is an awesome presence reflected in the mercurial human heart, and consequently, the Story girls are preternaturally sensitive to storms, ghosts, and plant and animal spirits. Meg is practical, while Elv and Claire share a tragic secret, and Elv channels her anguish into elaborate, demon-haunted tales of an imaginary parallel world until she discovers more effective means of self-punishment. The always dazzling Hoffman has outdone herself in this bewitching weave of psychologically astute fantasy and shattering realism, encompassing rape, drug addiction, disease, and fatal accidents. Her alluring characters are soulful, their suffering mythic, and though the sorrows are many and the body count high, this is an entrancing and romantic drama shot through with radiant beauty and belief in human resilience and transformation.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Lyrical but atypically monotonous, bestseller Hoffman's (The Third Angel) latest follows the dark family saga of Elv, Megan and Claire Story, sisters plagued by uncommon sadness. As a child, Elv spun fairy tales of a magical world for her sisters, but a period of savage sexual abuse-information about which slowly leaks out-sends her spiraling into years of drug addiction and painful self-abuse. Elv's story is unrelentingly grim, and without Hoffman's characteristic magic realism, its simple downward spiral becomes exhausting. Tragedy after tragedy befalls the family-Elv's commitment to a juvenile rehab facility, a deadly accident, a fatal illness and betrayal after betrayal. When the last third of the book turns to focus on Claire, who has been so damaged by the family crises that she refuses to speak, the slight glimmers of hope and goodness are too little, too late. Hoffman's prose is as lovely as ever: the imagined and real worlds of the Story sisters are rich and clear, but Elv's troubles and the Story family's nonstop catastrophes are wearying. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Once upon a time on Long Island, there were three Story sisters: Elv, Meg, and Claire. Aged 12 to 15, they were all beautiful and well behaved, with long, dark hair and pale eyes. They lived in magical harmony, speaking a private, shared language. Their parents were divorced, and the sisters visited their grandparents in Paris every spring. But their mother, Annie, feels increasingly left out of her daughters' lives. Indeed, darkness is soon to fall. Elv's belief in a secret underworld spins out of control, and she begins using drugs and stealing. Sent away to reform school, she falls in love with a man who is a heroin addict. There are betrayals and accidents, Annie falls ill, and the Story family disintegrates before our eyes. This is one of Hoffman's darkest novels yet, and some of Hoffman's readers may find it too dark. But name recognition advises purchase of multiple copies for libraries, and hope for the family's healing keeps readers, heartbroken yet spellbound, turning the pages. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/09.]-Keddy Ann Outlaw, Harris Cty. P.L., Houston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An act of child abuse has lasting consequences in Hoffman's painfully moving novel (The Third Angel, 2008, etc.). The summer Claire Story was 8 and her sister Elv was 11, a man tried to abduct Claire in his car; Elv jumped in, told Claire to jump out, and it was hours before she returned. They never told their mother Annie or middle sister Megtheir father walked out that same summerand neither girl was ever the same. As the main narrative opens, when Elv is 15, she's becoming an out-of-control adolescent increasingly at odds with careful, rule-following Meg. Racked with guilt over the unknown horrors her sister endured in her place, Claire tries to be loyal, but as Elv's drug use and promiscuity escalate, she backs away. The desperate Annie finally takes Elv to a rehab facility, enlisting the reluctant support of her selfish ex-husband, who insists it's all her fault. At the facility, Elv meets Lorry, a thief and addict who introduces her to heroin, but who also really loves her. The chronology speeds up after Elv comes home and a dreadful accident seals her alienation from her family. Hoffman paints wrenching scenes of tentative efforts at reconciliation that just barely fail, as Elv becomes pregnant and cleans up, but loses Lorry to his "fatal flaw." A kindly detective brings late-life happiness to Annie and metes out delayed justice to Elv's abuser, but the disasters keep coming. Two sisters grow into adulthood, dreadfully damaged by the losses they've endured and their punishing self-blame for the mistakes they made. Hoffman's habitual allusions to mysterious supernatural forces are very jarring in this context, as is the endless interpolation of memories from the terrible abduction; she could have trusted her readers to get the point with out constant prodding. A radiant denouement shows love redeeming the surviving sisters, and there are beautiful moments throughout, but they don't entirely compensate for Hoffman's excesses of plot and tone. A near-miss from this uneven but always compelling writer. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1 Follow Once a year there was a knock at the door. Two times, then nothing. No one else heard, only me. Even when I was a baby in my cradle. My mother didn't hear. My father didn't hear. My sisters continued sleeping. But the cat looked up. When I was old enough I opened the door. There she was. A lady wearing a gray coat. She had a branch from a hawthorn tree, the one that grew outside my window. She spoke, but I didn't know her language. A big wind had come up and the door slammed shut. When I opened it again, she was gone. But I knew what she wanted. Me. The one word I'd understood was daughter. I asked my mother to tell me about the day I was born. She couldn't remember. I asked my father. He had no idea. My sisters were too young to know where I'd come from. When the gray lady next came, I asked the same question. I could tell from the look on her face. She knew the answer. She went down to the marsh, where the tall reeds grew, where the river began. I ran to keep up. She slipped into the water, all gray and murky. She waited for me to follow. I didn't think twice. I took off my boots. The water was cold. I went under fast. It was April in New York City and from the window of their room at the Plaza Hotel everything looked bright and green. The Story sisters were sharing a room on the evening of their grandparents' fiftieth anniversary party. Their mother trusted them completely. They were not the sort of teenagers who would steal from the minibar only to wind up drunk in the hallway, sprawled out on the carpet or nodding off in a doorway, embarrassing themselves and their families. They would never hang out the window to wave away cigarette smoke or toss water balloons onto unsuspecting pedestrians below. They were diligent, beautiful girls, well behaved, thoughtful. Most people were charmed to discover that the girls had a private, shared language. It was lovely to hear, musical. When they spoke to each other, they sounded like birds. The eldest girl was Elisabeth, called Elv, now fifteen. Meg was only a year younger, and Claire had just turned twelve. Each had long dark hair and pale eyes, a startling combination. Elv was a disciplined dancer, the most beautiful in many people's opinions, the one who had invented the Story sisters' secret world. Meg was a great reader and was never without a book; while walking to school she often had one open in her hands, so engrossed she would sometimes trip while navigating familiar streets. Claire was diligent, kindhearted, never one to shirk chores. Her bed was made before her sisters opened their sleepy eyes. She raked the lawn and watered the garden and always went to sleep on time. All were self-reliant and practical, honor students any parents would be proud to claim as their own. But when the girls' mother came upon them chattering away in that language no one else could understand, when she spied maps and graphs that meant nothing to her, that defined another world, her daughters made her think of clouds, something far away and inaccessible. Annie and the girls' father had divorced four years earlier, the summer of the gypsy moths when all of the trees in their yard were bare, the leaves chewed by caterpillars. You could hear crunching in the night. You could see silvery cocoon webbing in porch rafters and strung across stop signs. People said there were bound to be hard times ahead for the Storys. Alan was a high school principal, his schedule too full for many visits. He'd been the one who'd wanted out of the marriage, and after the split he'd all but disappeared. At the age of forty-seven, he'd become a ladies' man, or maybe it was simply that there weren't many men around at that stage of the game. Suddenly he was in demand. There was another woman in the background during the breakup. Excerpted from The Story Sisters: A Novel by Alice Hoffman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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