Skylight Confessions Paperback – 7 Feb. 2008

A nice book. It won't set the world alight but I enjoyed it

great book

excellent book

This was my first Alice Hoffman novel and I was blown away by it (I wasn't expecting much, having picked it up at a charity book drive and it looked like the best of a bad bunch!)I loved the elements of other-wordliness, intertwined with the very real tragedies of this complex family. The portrayal of addiction was particularly heartbreaking and true to life.She writes about love in simple but beautiful prose. A captivating read.

another one for my collection

Another enchanting and magical, yet poignantly bittersweet, novel from Hoffman. John and Arlie fall in love in a misguided haze of youth. After a spell trapped in an increasingly meaningless marriage Arlie rebels against the way her life has turned out, then tragically falls ill. With Arlie gone life spirals downwards for those who surrounded her: John is haunted by the memory of his beautiful wife, his son Sam is going off the rails and little Blanca is just tripping along trying to make sense of everything. Then Meredith enters their lives, strangely drawn into their problems and determined to rescue them from themselves. A few years later, the children are grown and life has moved on yet again...In the same vein as 'Blackbird House', the novel's poignancy lies in its beautiful observations of life through the generations, as characters we come to care deeply about grow, live, love, and die. Folklore and magic weave through the storyline but never grow cloying, as this spirituality lies twisted within the experiences of the characters rather than being thrown in our faces as a narrative element.In short, another wonderful novel - my second favourite Hoffman so far, after the masterpiece that is 'The Ice Queen.' I'd give it four and a half stars if I could - highly recommended!

Author Alice Hoffman excels at weaving elements of fantasy and fairy tale into everyday existence. In her latest novel Skylight Confessions she traces the hopes, disappointments and loves of three generations of one family, the Moodys, and in the process, teaches us some important lessons about the endless cycles of life.The novel begins with the character of Arlyn Singer, a girl of seventeen who is living in Long Island when her father tells her to prepare for the future. When he suddenly dies in an accident, Arlyn is set adrift until she meets a stranger who stopping to talk to her in an old Saab. "I'm lost," he says as Arlyn shivers in the cold light of her future and the light cast by this tall and attractive young man who has no idea where he is.His name is John Moody, an architect and a self-confessed champion of quiet and order, and Arlyn equally charms him with her long red hair, despite her dreadful clothes and the freckles scattered across her skin. They inevitably sleep together, but John is suddenly plagued by nightmares, filled with disasters, wrong turns, and mistakes. Considering the dreams a bad sign, he runs away, back to New Haven, to college, and to his exams.Arlyn however tracks him down and soon they are married and living in John's Glass Slipper, a house made of glass and steel, where Arlyn now a twenty-something woman, has two children Sam and Blanca. As Arlyn's influence eventually diminishes, a girl called Meredith becomes attracted to the Glass Slipper "where there's light everywhere and green all around," and agrees to take on the children.Meanwhile, John is far too busy for the likes of Sam and Blanca; he sees them as fools who waste their time on squirrels and books and happiness, whilst everyday, he sees signs of something he doesn't want to see - all he's done wrong in his life. A teenage drug addict, Sam is unhappy and conflicted, constantly hung over and sick from drugs, the boy reluctant to return to a straight life.And Meredith, who realizes that her current life is a thousand times more important and truer than the life she had led since. She sees the needle marks on Sam's arm and tries to help him, certain that she can intuit his pain. For her part, Blanca grows older, her past shrouded in secrecy, her life defined by books and fairy tales. Blanca's world is indeed divided, "the before and after, the dark and light, the real and the imagined."Hoffman's themes are all about belonging and the choices that we are often forced to make in life, whether they may be wrong turns or not. But Skylight Confessions is also about the enormous power of love, where love can often tie you to a place from which you never wish to roam, and where death might also tie the atoms that made you to that very same place.All of Hoffman's characters are seeking seek to understand the mysteries of life, indeed John has mysterious visions of Arlyn with her white dress and long red hair, and also young, the way they had met when they first met, when he'd gotten so lost he couldn't find his way. And Blanca stays haunted by Sam and the sometimes-difficult relationship with her father as she tries to build a life for herself far away in London.As with all Hoffman's novels, the spirit world plays an important part in the story, with this notion of people almost trapped in time, their visions from beyond the grave providing the sudden snap, "the crack in their lives that brakes the quiet in tow..." Beautifully written, Skylight Confessions says a lot about modern families with all of their expectations and reveries, whilst also exhibiting many of those attributes that have made Hoffman's previous works so successful. Mike Leonard March 07.

As a long-term fan of Alice Hoffman, I was disappointed by this novel.The stories didn't interweave quite strongly enough for me.I didn't feel the same atmosphere as I had in many other of her books, and I was left wanting.