The Red Garden is a fantastical history of Blackwell, Mass., from 1750 to the present, replete with intermarried families, melancholic bears and altruistic mermaids ...presents fables in dated, chronological order, beginning with William Brady's catastrophic expedition to the Berkshire frontier... Narrative intimacy and authority are apparent in Hoffman's aphoristic sentences ... Although her characterization is stronger on archetype than on human idiosyncrasy and some plots are contrived, Hoffman's spirit of place shines ... Hoffman exhibits her usual curiosity about and sympathy with outcasts.
While it could plausibly be either a linked story collection or a novel, it is neither fish nor fowl, but, rather, a lovingly befinned and befeathered chimera of both ...are 14 swift, consecutive stories in the book, most of which stand firmly on their own ...a dazzled reader has to put down the book for a time to allow the narratives to gently sink in ...we are taken in such a rapid-fire manner through the history of Blackwell, in a way that dismisses to oblivion most of the characters as soon as their stories are over, the book's necessary anchor quickly becomes the town itself ...only the elements of a town is akin to describing a person by listing physical characteristics, and the parts of Blackwell never congeal to become a unique and vivid place of its own ...the most satisfying way to think of The Red Garden is as a book of poetry poured into a prose mold.
...The Red Garden, is not, properly speaking, a novel at all. It’s a collection of 14 stories set in Blackwell, Mass., a fictional village deep in the woods of the Berkshires. Beginning with Blackwell’s founding in 1786 by a handful of inept, unprepared settlers, these stories span more than 200 years ...against a background of far-off historical events Hoffman sets the ongoing life of one small town and its episodic interaction with the natural world that surrounds it ... The strongest stories in The Red Garden are those in which the folktale form, despite its prescribed simplicity of perspective and voice, allows Hoffman’s gifts as a storyteller ample scope ... In the less effective stories here, the folk-tale form exhibits the defects of its virtues. Simplicity degenerates into simplification.
The Red Garden is a collection of 14 stories that unfold, over the course of three centuries, in a Berkshire County town famous for its eels, the dogs and bears who are forever altering the course of human destiny, and its blood-red soil ...stories are populated by the generations of Motts, Patridges, Starrs and Jacobs who mix and marry in the shadow of Hightop Mountain. But they are animated by Hoffman's ongoing fascination with fairy tales... The great consolation, and inspiration, in reading Hoffman is recognizing that we all carry such stories, some almost as good as hers; we just don't tell them with the same attention to detail, the same eye toward forgiveness, the same balance of recklessness and restraint.
Alice Hoffman's The Red Garden is a dreamy, fabulist series of connected stories set in Blackwell, Mass., a small town in the Berkshires ...subsequent stories tell of more such women. Most are accompanied by a date... Individual tragedies are offset by Hoffman's penchant for fairy-tale syntax and events ... Hoffman's consciously simple style transforms people's pain into mythic parable. The morals of these stories are satisfying, particularly the endings, which add just the right combination of finality and resonance... Lulling and thought-provoking, she conjures soothing places where readers, like the children to whom we tell fairy tales, can learn with pleasure.
Lush and full, intertwined with tales of the families who founded the tiny (fictional) Berkshires town of Blackwell, Mass. Hoffman digs up the dirt on 250 years of Blackwell history: its settlers and interlopers, their descendants and the one cryptic constant in their lives, a garden of red earth that nourishes only red vegetation ...prose, fittingly hushed, toys with the truth of the town...in unearthing the legend of Blackwell, Hoffman taps into the story of America, ticking off often predictable milestones Forrest Gump-style ... With every chapter of the novel comes a new chapter in the town's history — and a new, if vaguely familiar, crop of characters (they're the children and grandchildren of the folks in the preceding chapters, after all). The effect is dizzying.
The Red Garden consists of 14 chapters, each an independent short story, connected by the common ancestry of the characters as well as the town itself, which even by the year 2000 remained isolated... The first story follows Hallie’s adventures in the mid-18th century as she fearlessly tackles the unknown. In the last chapter, Hallie’s descendant, young James Mott, takes life in stride and sets forth alone with only his dog for company at the end of the 20th century... Many of the elements of fairy tales are present in these stories... The language of the stories gradually changes from an old-fashioned semiformal style to a harsher contemporary tone ... The Red Garden is not great literature, but it is a delightful, sometimes enthralling collection of well-written stories, an effective combination of romance and reality.
...The Red Garden, which is a collection of linked short stories that tell the history of fictional Blackwell, Massachusetts, from its founding in 1750 to the late 20th century ...will see how these myths grow out of history, and how people's stories shape place as much as geography or historical events do ... Alice Hoffman is often known as a magical realist, and her work in The Red Garden is no exception ... The emotional heft of The Red Garden can sneak up on you, as Hoffman conveys awful incidents, intense passions and haunting images in the simplest, most matter-of-fact prose.
In 14 freestanding but consecutive stories, Hoffman traces the life of the town of Blackwell, Mass., from its founding in 1750 up to the present as the founders’ descendents connect to the land and each other ... Together the lovers re-bury the bones ... Fans of Hoffman’s brand of mystical whimsy will find this paean to New England one of her most satisfying.
Hoffman brings us 200 years in the history of Blackwell, a small town in rural Massachusetts, in her insightful latest. The story opens with the arrival of the first settlers, among them a pragmatic English woman, Hallie, and her profligate, braggart husband, William ... The novel moves forward in linked stories, each building on (but not following from) the previous and focusing on a wide range of characters... The result is a certain ethereal detachment as Hoffman's deft magical realism ties one woman's story to the next even when they themselves are not aware of the connection. The prose is beautiful, the characters drawn sparsely but with great compassion.
