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Title: The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman
Details: Copyright 2009, Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Alice Hoffman's previous novel, The Third Angel, was hailed as "unforgettable portrait of the depth of true love" (USA Today), "passionate" (People), and "spellbinding" (Miami Herald). Her new novel, The Story Sisters, charts the lives of three sisters—Elv, Claire, and Meg. Each has a fate she must meet alone: one on a country road, one in the streets of Paris, and one in the corridors of her own imagination. At once a coming-of-age tale, a family saga, and a love story of erotic longing, The Story Sisters sifts through the miraculous and the mundane as the girls become women and their choices haunt them, change them and, finally, redeem them."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I am a well-known and outspoken Alice Hoffman fan.
How I Liked It:
Alice Hoffman is a brilliant writer. Take my word for it. Even her lesser fare still has a lot of dazzle and delight, and most importantly, she's a prolific and brilliant writer with a long, long resume.
So it's somewhat unfair that her greatest fame comes not from one of her books, but from a poorly adapted (yes, I said it: see it without the nostalgia factor and read the damn book) film version that flopped initially (she did not write the screenplay) but picked up a nostalgic following when it was unloaded for cheap on television. I'm of course referring to the formidable Practical Magic, so satisfying and well-crafted as (the first) novel, so badly done, overused trope-y, and a waste of talent as a movie.
So what all does the author's resume have to do with this particular book? We'll see!
But before you do, meet the Story Sisters! Oldest is Elizabeth, called "Elv", next up is Meg, a year younger, then baby Claire, two years younger than Meg. We meet the sisters at ages 15, 14, and 12 at their maternal grandparents' fiftieth wedding anniversary at the Plaza Hotel. The girls' father divorced their mother a few years before and has pretty much checked out of their lives for his bevy of new girlfriends. We get references to the sisters' early lives, including a horrific incident Elv suffered at eleven at the hands of a child predator who grabbed her littlest sister first, before Elv took her place. Elv has never told anyone the details, not even Claire, who knows she escaped a terrible fate only because her sister endured it. To cope, Elv has invented a rich fantasy world of fairy complete with its own language that she shares with her sisters. At their grandparents' party, the girls steal off to free a carriage horse from a life of cruelty, Claire is seriously injured and requires recuperation, which further seals her and Elv's bond as they spend more time together. The girls' mother, Annie, knows something happened to Elv and knows about the secret world her daughters share, but is kept out.
As Elv ages into her teens, she starts acting out in the ways that people with unprocessed trauma can do, living in her fantasy world and wrecking havoc on the real one. As a last resort, her parents send her to a fancy, frightening corrective boarding school, but she only makes dangerous acquaintances (and escapes) there.
In her absence, her sisters Meg and Claire grow closer, but miss their sister and don't know quite how to act when she returns. On a horrific visit, she takes them on a joyride that ends in a horrific crash, killing Meg.
Consumed with guilt and horror, Elv takes up a life with a sketchy older brother of one of her boarding school classmates, Lorry, who's full of stories, but are any of them even true? As Elv hides out, Claire helps their mother, who is crippled by cancer. Annie hires a detective, Pete, to find her lost oldest daughter, who does, but falls in love with Annie in the process and becomes a father figure to her girls.
Then Elv lands herself in prison for helping her boyfriend pull off a scam, and Annie is dying of cancer. Pete keeps watch over Elv due to Annie, and Claire goes to Paris to live with her maternal grandmother and her community, including a lifelong friend who sets up Claire with her grandson. Eventually, Claire finds her way to becoming an apprentice for a jeweler and then a skilled jeweler herself.
Meanwhile, Elv is pregnant with her boyfriend's baby and he's using drugs. When Lorry disappears, it's Pete who finds her and breaks the news that Lorry's died of a drug overdose. Elv and Pete begin a lovely father and daughter relationship with him acting as a grandfather to the daughter Elv eventually has, Mimi. Mimi and Elv correspond with their Paris relations, including the estranged Claire. Claire invites Pete, Elv, and Mimi to her wedding in Paris to her grandmother's friend's grandson, and the book ends with Claire meeting Mimi and her wedding taking place (where presumably the two estranged sisters will reunite) much to the delight of the girls' grandmother and their grandmother's friend.
This has all the elements that dazzle in an Alice Hoffman story: a gorgeous sense of setting, a sense of magic, and a lyrical lovely take on magical realism. So why isn't this a better story? Sadly, the book never seems to find a cohesive footing and we don't get the time with or depths of certain characters we need for their stories to truly hook us the way they should. Too much feels last minute or slapdash and given the gravity of many elements of the story, it really can't in order for it to work. No amount of bodies Hoffman may throw at it (and the book is full of tragic deaths, including some I haven't named) makes up for amount of time spent with these characters in order to mourn them and feel for them. I also noticed that this more than any other Alice Hoffman book is a lot of telling rather than showing. We're told how the sisters relate to one another, but we don't get enough of seeing it. And unfortunately other character details (like Elv's love and protection of animals) land too often on the tell-not-show rather than the fairytale imagining.
And it's a shame, because there are so many amazing elements here. A troubled girl finding refuge in a fantasy world, the close bonds between siblings finding one another again even when tested severely, found family and new love, the many half-told stories of the Story family and their quirkiness, and plenty of exquisite Hoffmanesque magical realism in the form of ghosts and demons, not to mention each story opening with a bit of a folktale.
But in the end, it sadly just comes across as someone telling a story that's pretty interesting, but they keep getting distracted by other details and end up not actually telling the story (nor telling the details!). And in an Alice Hoffman story, that's a crime.
Because Alice Hoffman is such a brilliant writer, even a book of hers that could use several more rewrites is still pretty darn engaging, even if you can only imagine the story it might have been.
Notable: I feel like I should note again the strange discrepancy between publishing promotional material and actual book. I did not see anything about "erotic longing" in this book. Lorry and Elv have an initially clandestine sexual relationship (when she's underage, incidentally), and Elv hangs a lot of her traumatized, misguided hopes and dreams on Lorry, but it's not quite "erotic longing".
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Her skin was patterned with very fine lines that made Elv think of the way leaves are veined, how beautiful they are when sunlight filters through. (pg 39)
In a culture that generally views standards of beauty in an overwhelmingly (and pretty creepily) youth-centered way, this is actually even more beautiful. Of course, in fairness, it starts with "You didn't see how old she was unless you looked very carefully."
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Annie had done nothing but research for the past few weeks. She had hired a consultant and seen a therapist. She had been on the Internet and talked with other distraught parents halfway across the country. (pg 91)
I wasn't entirely sure what era in which this novel is meant to occur. For reasons I can't quite place, it was giving me a vaguely 1970s feeling, and there's a suggestion that the friend of the girls' grandmother might have survived the Holocaust which might help nail down a date, and then this one, random Internet reference.
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The boarding school where Elv is sent sounds a lot like the notorious Élan school:
By the end of the first month Elv had come to understand the school's philosophy. They swiftly broke you down until you were nothing. They destroyed you, then built you back up again. Only they did it in their way, the Westfield way. What they wanted were clones, people without minds of their own who had the Westfield agenda imprinted on their souls. They hammered at people, tearing them apart in therapy groups. During the first month, Elv had a piece of cardboard strung around her neck that proclaimed I AM A LIAR. She had told a teacher she had missed class because she felt feverish, but when her temperature was taken it had been normal. Well, she'd hated that class. And if she was a liar, at least she was good at it. They'd have to do a whole lot more than dangle a sign around her neck if they wanted to humiliate her. Thankfully, she wasn't in the group with the therapist who insisted his patients strip naked and stand in a circle so they couldn't hide their inner selves. They would have had to tear her clothes off, and even then she wasn't about to reveal anything. (pg 99)
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In a world of sorrow, love was an act of will. (pg 318)
Classic Hoffman.
Final Grade: C
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