Explore our new BookBrowse Community Forum!

Book Summary and Reviews of The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman

The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman

The Red Garden

by Alice Hoffman

  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • Published:
  • Jan 2011, 288 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About this book

Book Summary

"The Red Garden introduces us to the luminous and haunting world of Blackwell, Massachusetts. Hoffman offers a transforming glimpse of small-town America, presenting us with some three hundred years of passion, dark secrets, loyalty, and redemption in a web of tales.

From the town’s founder, a brave young woman from England who has no fear of blizzards or bears, to the young man who runs away to New York City, the characters in The Red Garden are extraordinary and vivid: a young wounded Civil War soldier who is saved by a neighbor, a woman who meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet who falls in love with a blind man, a mysterious traveler who comes to town in the year when summer never arrives. At the center of everyone’s life is a garden where only red plants can grow, and where the truth can be found by those who dare to look. The Red Garden is as unforgettable as it is moving.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. In gloriously sensuous, suspenseful, mystical, tragic, and redemptive episodes, Hoffman subtly alters her language, from an almost biblical voice to increasingly nuanced and intricate prose reflecting the burgeoning social and psychological complexities her passionate and searching characters face in an ever-changing world." - Booklist

"Fans of Hoffman’s brand of mystical whimsy will find this paean to New England one of her most satisfying." - Kirkus Review

"Starred Review. ... [A] compelling collection of fairy tales suffused with pathos and brightened by flashes of magic. Her fans ... will be enchanted." - Library Journal

"The prose is beautiful, the characters drawn sparsely but with great compassion." - Publishers Weekly

"Each episode in The Red Garden is a marvel - there isn't a disappointing one in the bunch." - Entertainment Weekly

This information about The Red Garden was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Cathryn Conroy

Looking for a Literary Treat You Won't Be Able to Stop Reading? Indulge in This Enchanting Novel!
This is a rich literary gem. The story, a gentle blend of magic and realism, is so so so good that you'll keep reading long after you should.

Written by Alice Hoffman, this is the intriguing story of people who lived in a very small town in the Berkshires in Massachusetts—from its founding 300 years ago to today. Even Johnny Appleseed and Emily Dickinson have roles in this town's history. This is a novel, but each chapter is really a short story with a distinct beginning, middle, and end, yet each is connected with the others through shared characters and a mysterious garden where sorrows are buried. In this enigmatic garden, which has distinctly red soil, only red plants will grow. If they're not naturally red, then they turn red.

This novel-short story hybrid is not the easiest format for a writer or a reader, but Hoffman is an expert, and each chapter seamlessly moves into the next for a compelling and engaging book. The story is held together with tall tales and legends of the past (but we readers know what really happened!) and secrets that are slowly revealed. There is love and heartbreak, births and deaths, struggle and survival, hurting and healing, evil and virtue, fear and courage, apparitions and reality. This is a powerful, compassionate story of life.

Meanwhile, the descriptions of the blizzards, the black flies, and the eels swimming in the river are so vivid you'll feel the cold, hear the buzzing, and see the black oozing in the water as it rapidly flows downstream.

If you're looking for a literary treat, indulge in this enchanting novel.

KATHLEEN LINDENMUTH

The Red Garden
Don't miss it - one of this year's best.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Alice Hoffman Author Biography

Photo: Deborah Feingold

Alice Hoffman was born in New York City on March 16, 1952 and grew up on Long Island. After graduating from high school in 1969, she attended Adelphi University, from which she received a BA, and then received a Mirrellees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, which she attended in 1973 and '74, receiving an MA in creative writing. She currently lives in Boston.

Hoffman's first novel, Property Of, was written at the age of twenty-one, while she was studying at Stanford, and published shortly thereafter by Farrar Straus and Giroux. She credits her mentor, professor and writer Albert J. Guerard, and his wife, the writer Maclin Bocock Guerard, for helping her to publish her first short story in the magazine Fiction. Editor Ted Solotaroff then contacted her to ...

... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Alice Hoffman's Website

Other books by Alice Hoffman at BookBrowse
  • The World That We Knew jacket
  • The Rules of Magic jacket

16 more...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Our Evenings
    Our Evenings
    by Alan Hollinghurst
    Alan Hollinghurst's novel Our Evenings is the fictional autobiography of Dave Win, a British ...
  • Book Jacket: Graveyard Shift
    Graveyard Shift
    by M. L. Rio
    Following the success of her debut novel, If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio's latest book is the quasi-...
  • Book Jacket: The Sisters K
    The Sisters K
    by Maureen Sun
    The Kim sisters—Minah, Sarah, and Esther—have just learned their father is dying of ...
  • Book Jacket: Linguaphile
    Linguaphile
    by Julie Sedivy
    From an infant's first attempts to connect with the world around them to the final words shared with...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do ...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

F the M

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.