Book Review
'Blackbird House': Life, love, loss through years in one house

By Rebecca Taylor
Special to The Seattle Times

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Picture a house inland from Cape Cod that smells of salt and lilacs but has no view of the water. A house in a small cove with a back yard that holds a pond, a beloved horse and a hated man. A house made of the wood from wrecked ships, filled with generations of stories of lost love, passion and death. "Blackbird House" holds the accounts the house would tell, magical tales of witches and sailors, stories of the generations of occupants that called it home.

Author Alice Hoffman writes: "People buy houses for all sorts of reasons. [F]or shelter, for solace, for love, for investment." She explores each of these reasons in her newest work of fiction. Each character she introduces to the house approaches the home for unique reasons, and each leaves in some way changed.

Coral Hadley, whose husband built the house before the American Revolution, loses her family in a storm on the Cape. As a child, Ruth Blackbird Hill loses her family in a fire and finds herself at Blackbird House, caring for a man who lost his leg while at sea. Violet Cross falls in love with a man who doesn't love her but who falls for her sister.

Violet's child, Lion, is the village's star-child and the first to attend Harvard. Her sorrow after his death affects Violet's relationship with Lion's son and his new wife. All the stories intertwine through history and revolve around the house, which remains the same as the world around it vaults forward through time.

"Blackbird House" by Alice Hoffman Doubleday, 225 pp., $19.95

Hoffman's stories are also an exploration of color. A blackbird turns white after being flung from a sinking boat as a last, desperate act of love. The white bird haunts the house through 200 years of its history. The house peels its white paint through much of the book, and a tree that only bears blood-red pears is planted in the front yard by a man seeking the happiness of a woman. Red and white, blood and skin, sun and sky. They add to the stories with flashes of meaning and add depth to the story's sorrow.

"Blackbird House" details the spaces between time, the evolution of a home and the heartbreak, love and sadness that transpire as new occupants move in and leave. Hoffman masterfully plays with the tensions between character and place, creating a setting so vivid that it breathes and bleeds along with her characters.

Rebecca Taylor is a news assistant at The Seattle Times

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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