
Alice Hoffman, Skylight Confessions
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Alice Hoffman, Skylight Confessions
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Skylight Confessions Alice Hoffman Lit
Skylight Confessions
Alice Hoffman
Little, Brown, Jan 2007, $24.99
ISBN: 0316058785
With the death of her dad, seventeen years old Arlie Singer feels all alone, her mother having died years ago. She vows that the first male she meets is her true love whom she will marry. Yale student John Moody stops to ask Arlie for directions, but instead of continuing his journey she seduces him as her true love. John returns to school, but Arlie follows. They marry, she gives birth to Sam, and when his parents retire, the couple moves into the Glass Slipper, an all glass home.
John ignores his troubled offspring and has even less time for his wife. Arlie knows she made a mistake when she meets George Snow, who cleans her home's windows. Though she has a baby by George she will not leave her son for him. Not even ten years into their dysfunctional marriage Arlie dies from breast cancer.
Sam is an angry man who hates his father and his stepmother as John remarried almost to the day of Arlie's death. Sam vanishes while his younger sister Blanca feels like an outsider since Cynthia became her stepmother. When she has a chance she flees to open up a bookstore in London though her nanny Meredith, who along with John see Arlie's ghost, has another offspring to raise as Cynthia gives John a third offspring.
The key cast members seem so real in their dysfunctional relationships and their overall destructive personal behavior that in turn the storyline is depressing yet there is twinkling of possible redemption if one accepts responsibility for errors. The key to this somewhat morbid tale is the characters as the sins of the parents (including the stepmother) are replayed by the children. The paranormal element seems too Hamlet-like, but still fans of deep family dramas will want to follow the seemingly ill-fated obliteration of people who fear the truth when that is the only means of salvation from one's destructive genes.
Harriet Klausner
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