I just read both Coreography by Corey Feldman and Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman at the same time. But I need to tell you about The Blackbird House.
The idea that there is a house out there somewhere, filled with stories of love, tragedy, fire, birth, death, and otherwise, that spans over many, many generations and timeframes, and the idea would be if that house could talk, that's what Blackbird House is.
Hoffman's prose is kind, gentle, harsh, and beautiful, all at the same time. Her stories are timeless, as shown throughout the book, with repeating tales with each one. One being the blackbird that turned white. Another, that no matter how hard you try to run away, life will always catch up with you. And yet another, home is where the heart is.
Very few books make me cry. And this book did that with more than one story. And rather than being a book of short stories disconnected from one another, each one was connected by a thread. Sometimes that thread was the house, and sometimes it was the people.
This book made me long for my summer home growing up. It was in a small town, with a private beach for those who owned homes there. We'd get up and spend everyday at the beach, at the Ben Franklin in town, or out in the swamp--that was swallowing half of our neighborhood whole--catching frogs. Life was easy, and simple and sweet. And that's just what Blackbird House is: from the moment it was built by a lovestruck husband who'd give his wife anything in the world, to the girl who's parents bought it on a whim.
Now I feel like I have to visit the cape in Massachusetts (the place at the end of the world), to see if the air really does smell sweeter or if the light is different from everywhere else, a peach light, a summer light. I wanted to be there as I read it's stories. For the stories are not just Hoffman's, they belong to Blackbird House.
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