Still A Dreamer

I may have written this elsewhere on my blog about Alice Hoffman, but I will say it again. She never disappoints as an author, and she is a master of the well-crafted, cannot-put-it-down novel.

Blue Diary is the latest of Alice Hoffman’s that I’ve read – just finished it, in fact, and I feel like I want to pick it up and read it again; I didn’t want it to end, and I feel like another reading will further enrich my experience in Monroe, MA. Hoffman’s characters are so real – so relatable. They are people you know, flawed, struggling, yet with their own — sometimes surprising — depths of strength.

A family man with a wife and child who adore him, a worker in the small town relied upon for his excellent services, and a volunteer fireman honored because he is often the first to go into a fire fearlessly and rescue someone trapped. Yet on one morning the police arrive – his own friends – and take him away in handcuffs for a crime he allegedly committed 13 years ago in a different state under a different name. How has this happened?

I suppose in a way you can say this is a murder mystery, but it is so much more than that. It is an examination of the hearts and souls of the people whose lives Ethan Ford has touched,  and those of their friends and loved ones as things start to come apart at the seams, and also of those whose lives he has ruined. It is a mystery that needs sorting out by many different people. Over the course of Blue Diary, the mystery is revealed, played out through the many characters we get to know and care about.

The second chapter in Part One, simply entitled “True,” is from the POV of Kat, neighbor and 12 year old friend of Ethan Ford’s son, Collie. She says, “The first thing I noticed was that he could walk past a mirror without casting a reflection. My grandmother always told me that a mirror can shine back a person’s dishonesty, but what did it mean for a man to have no reflection at all?” This is not a tale of vampires, or the supernatural, but an insight of a child who can appraise a truth. Something no one else has quite been able to grasp, though past inklings come to light for some. Masterfully woven into the main plot are several sub-plots, all wonderfully intriguing.

And then there’s Hoffman’s writing itself. Her writing has been described as “lush” and “luminous” and these are accurate. Her way with words is so incredibly rich, I never want to leave her world – whichever book’s world she has enticed me to enter. Perhaps it’s why I’m inclined to want to read this again immediately after just finishing it. Her descriptions of place, of experience, of emotion are so compelling that I am there. It’s an amazing gift, and I don’t know of that many authors I’ve read that share it so consistently, novel after novel. Blue Diary is a terrific read.

So what next? What can follow such an engrossing story? Or should I just enjoy it again?