The Third Angel
by Alice Hoffman (Crown Publishing, ISBN 9780307393852, $25.00)
Reading Alice Hoffman
always makes me want to fall in love—-a perverse sentiment, I know, since
she’s made a career out of detailing the anguish of misplaced or impossible
affection. But her characters love with such strength and passion that it
transforms their whole lives, and often the natural world around them; it’s
the imaginative extension of our own desires, the way our emotions seem so
vast we wonder that the universe doesn’t reflect them.
In The Third Angel,
Hoffman takes up her theme in a backward-spiraling narrative of three women
in love with the wrong men: Maddie Heller, infatuated with her sister’s
fiancé; Frieda Lewis, aching for a drug-addicted rock star; Bryn Evans, on
the point of marrying a good man yet unable to shake her feelings for her
con-man ex-husband. All three stories are pulled together by the Lion Park
Hotel in London and room 707, haunted by the ghost of a terrible event that
took place there in 1952. What happened, of course, is all wrapped up in the
relentless force of tormented love—but, as she often does, Hoffman reveals
the power of pain to bring redemption in unexpected ways.
Review by
Anna
Perleberg, April 17, 2008
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