Skylight Confessions
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A National Bestseller
Arlyn Singer believes in destiny and love. On the night her father dies she’s sure fate will send her true love to her. But destiny seems to be playing a trick when he sends her John Moody who is dreamy Arlyn’s opposite. Their marriage leads them and their children to a glass house in Connecticut built by John’s father, a place of skylights and fairytales, of ghosts and regret. Their son, Sam, is a brilliant, explosive artist. Daughter Blanca is a beautiful loner who tries to protect her brother from his demons and his destiny and who lives in a world of books. Will, Arlyn and John’s grandson, is left to put together the mysterious pieces of their family, a puzzle of people who don’t know the first thing about love. All families make their own rules, and the Moodys are no exception.
Praise
“One of Hoffman’s very best. . . . Skylight Confessions has all the hallmarks of a Hoffman novel: well-wrought and empathetic characters, love gone awry, interstitial magic, ghosts real and metaphoric, familial dissent, and emotional fractures. Skylight Confessions also has the beautifully wrought language and compelling imagery that make each Hoffman tale come alive. . . . Skylight Confessions is a beautiful, intricate, lush, and ineffably sad novel of one family’s arduous path toward wholeness. Hoffman is one of our great storytellers and one who knows the American family in all its many facets. In Skylight Confessions, she has once again written a story and characters that are truly unforgettable. A novel to be savored.”
—Victoria A. Brownworth, Baltimore Sun
“Wholly original and haunting.”
—Parade
“This is one of Hoffman’s best. . . . Even when these characters are shadowed by the ghosts anchored in their past, it is obvious they are in the hands of a loving creator, a woman who continues to write with amazing grace.”
—Steve Duin, Portland Oregonian
“A gloriously spooky ghost story about a dysfunctional family trying to deny its past. . . . Hoffman’s touch is so deft, her tone so austere, that the paranormal – china that breaks itself, strange scents, red-headed specters – seems normal. . . . Hoffman’s restrained, elegantly plain prose recalls Eudora Welty’s fairy tales. . . . Like Welty, Hoffman can be sly, black-humored, and startlingly powerful. . . . Hoffman’s night-dark fairy tale offers no panacea from the pain of being human except a sense of the wonder of the world. That what literature is for, after all.”
—Diane Roberts, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Haunting. . . . Achingly beautiful and filled with heart-wrenchingly real characters: one of Hoffman’s best.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Alice Hoffman remains a literary sorceress par excellence. She has spun yet another haunting, fairy tale–like fiction for grown-ups. . . . In a novel that unfolds like a dream, Hoffman reminds readers that love and family create the most potent magic of all.”
—Martha Woodall, Philadelphia Inquirer
“Hoffman’s shimmering, multigenerational melodrama bewitches with supernatural imagery while imaginatively dramatizing all-too-common heartaches.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist starred review
“Skylight Confessions isn’t just Hoffman’s best recent novel; it’s one of the best of a distinguished list that includes Turtle Moon and Practical Magic. . . . Long after the last page is turned, the characters and their stories are impossible to forget.”
—Gail Pennington, St. Louis Post-Dispatch