In this first-rate "tape turner" Hoffman once again proves her powers as a storyteller. Dialogue rings remarkably true in this reading by Susan Ericksen, which also brings out the incisive details and keen observations on nature, both human and otherwise, that Hoffman carefully deploys in this masterful narrative.

When March Murray travels East with her teenage daughter to attend the funeral of the beloved housekeeper who looked after her when she was growing up, March's past comes rushing up to meet her. The present is quickly dominated by the lurking presence of her former lover, Hollis, who has patiently awaited her long overdue return. The tale is populated by those for whom love brings more sorrow than happiness: a woman afraid to commit to a relationship, a husband in love with someone other than his wife, two young people who fall for each other only to find they are close relatives, and the self-destructing love of Hollis and March. While love has the power to transform those who fall under its spell--devotion to an old racehorse turns March's daughter, a sullen teenager, into a strong young woman--the love March herself suffers robs her of nearly all sense and goodness. Hoffman deftly weaves her characters' stories against a vivid New England landscape where the past always has a grip on the present. And the listener is left at the end both satisfied and longing to hear more. --Anne Depue


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From Library Journal
As this novel opens, March Murray Cooper returns to her hometown, ostensibly to bury the woman who raised her but needing to resolve the unfinished business of her youthful love for Hollis, from whom she has been separated for years. Hollis has now grown into a man embittered by loneliness. He has learned neither to forgive nor to forget, and March must discover whether he can ever learn to love. Hoffman (Practical Magic, LJ 12/94) takes great care here to examine the many facets of love and relationships, turning them like a prism to reflect on March and Hollis. Hoffman's evocative language and her lyrical descriptions of place contrast sharply with the emotional scars that her characters must uncover and bear. Her novel is a haunting tale of a woman lost in and to love; it will enthrall the reader from beginning to end. Highly recommended.-?Caroline M. Hallsworth, Cambrian Coll., Sudbury, OntarioCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Entertainment Weekly, Mark Harris
Hoffman’s characters, male and female, tend to be defined by the restless, lonely ache of what’s missing in their lives, which becomes clear only when they fill the void with something either unexpectedly right or horribly wrong. Along the way, Hoffman seems to wriggle into their skin, breathe their air, and think their thoughts--in Here on Earth, she plumbs the interior lives of, among others, a drunken recluse, a heartsick teenage boy, an angry daughter, a near madman, a cuckolded husband, and three wounded women, with such modesty and skill that she seems to witness rather than invent their lives.


The New York Times Book Review, Karen Karbo
Alice Hoffman's 12th novel is by turns inspired, profound and dreadful…. The madness of being madly in love is one of the most difficult subjects to write about convincingly. And you've got to give Hoffman points for trying. Unfortunately, just as March is too good for Hollis, Hoffman is too good for a story like this.


From Booklist
Hoffman's powers of enchantment increase exponentially in each of her cosmically romantic novels. Just as she did in Practical Magic (1995), Hoffman depicts love as a disturbance in the field, but here it is manifested as an unpredictable force of nature that encompasses all extremes, from the chilling pall of winter to the life-and-death properties of fire. Richard, March's sweet but distracted husband, should not have let her return to their small New England hometown with only their teenage daughter, Gwen, for company. He should have known that when March left for the haunted terrain of Fox Hill, she would meet up with Hollis, the jealous and angry boy-man with whom she was so deeply in love as a young woman. Hollis transformed himself from a resentful charity case into a millionaire but left death and despair in his wake and achieved no joy through his success. And he's still obsessed with March, who slips right back into the confines of their passion because Hollis possesses the sort of power that makes women cling and submit. Hoffman walks a fine line between bodice-ripping trash romance and bewitching but intelligent fiction here, but her fluency in the language of the heart and the bruised tenderness of her prose lift her far above cliche, into a luminous realm where the souls of her poignant characters open like moonflowers. Donna Seaman


Book Description
The bestselling author of Turtle Moon and Practical Magic tells her most seductive and mesmerizing tale yet--the story of March Murray, who returns to her small Massachusetts hometown after nineteen years, encountering her childhood sweetheart...and discovering the heartbreaking and complex truth about their reckless and romantic love.

"A sound addition to an impressive body of work."--Boston Globe

"Sumptuous prose."--Denver Post

"Here on Earth is Hoffman's twelfth novel, and the spell she casts is stronger than ever."--Orlando Sentinel

* Includes a Reader's Guide

The New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club selection...with a Reader's Guide included.

FROM OUR EDITORS

When March Murray and her teenage daughter return to the town of her youth to attend a funeral, she comes face to face with the troubled man she still loves desperately. Against the advice of everyone in town, she follows her heart and leaves a broken marriage in her wake. Read by Susan Ericksen.

ANNOTATION

From bestselling author Alice Hoffman comes Here on Earth, a spellbinding tale of love and obsession. After nearly twenty years of living in California, March Murray, along with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, returns to the small Massachusetts town where she grew up to attend the funeral of Judith Dale, the beloved housekeeper who raised her. Thrust into the world of her past, March slowly realizes the complexity of the choices made by those around her, including Mrs. Dale, who knew more of love than March could have ever suspected; Alan, the brother whose tragic history has left him grief-stricken, with alcohol his only solace; and Hollis, the boy she loved, the man she can't seem to stay away from. Erotic, disturbing, and compelling, Here on Earth is the dramatic and lyrical account of the joys of love, and the destruction love can release.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From bestselling author Alice Hoffman comes Here on Earth, a spellbinding tale of love and obsession. After nearly twenty years of living in California, March Murray, along with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, returns to the small Massachusetts town where she grew up to attend the funeral of Judith Dale, the beloved housekeeper who raised her. Thrust into the world of her past, March slowly realizes the complexity of the choices made by those around her, including Mrs. Dale, who knew more of love than March could have ever suspected; Alan, the brother whose tragic history has left him grief-stricken, with alcohol his only solace; and Hollis, the boy she loved, the man she can't seem to stay away from. Erotic, disturbing, and compelling, Here on Earth is the dramatic and lyrical account of the joys of love, and the destruction love can release.

SYNOPSIS

From bestselling author Alice Hoffman comes Here on Earth, a spellbinding tale of love and obsession. After nearly twenty years of living in California, March Murray, along with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, returns to the small Massachusetts town where she grew up to attend the funeral of Judith Dale, the beloved housekeeper who raised her. Thrust into the world of her past, March slowly realizes the complexity of the choices made by those around her, including Mrs. Dale, who knew more of love than March could have ever suspected; Alan, the brother whose tragic history has left him grief-stricken, with alcohol his only solace; and Hollis, the boy she loved, the man she can't seem to stay away from. Erotic, disturbing, and compelling, Here on Earth is the dramatic and lyrical account of the joys of love, and the destruction love can release.

FROM THE CRITICS

Karen Karbo

Here on Earth' owes a lot to 'Wuthering Heights.' It is a testament to Hoffman's gifts for language and narrative -- not to mention her boldness -- that the novel works at all. . . despite Hoffman's confident lyricism, her novel's premise -- of doomed, fated love, submitted to without question -- never becomes fully plausible. -- New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Often, in her soulful novels, Hoffman (Practical Magic, etc.) lets mystical atmospherics-animals that take on superhuman qualities, intense colors and temperatures, minute vibrations in the air that signal ghosts or spirits-do all the work while her characters behave in strange and incredible ways under the influence of forces outside themselves. In this novel, the characters' behavior, while highly emotional, is initially at least traceable to psychological motivation. Unfortunately, Hoffman abandons psychological credibility halfway through, after which her protagonist, March Murray, behaves like an automaton. When March comes back to her childhood home in a small Massachusetts town after 19 years in California, she is swept with longing for Hollis, her former soul mate and lover who ran away in a fit of pique. March waited for him for three years, then married her next-door neighbor, Richard Cooper. When Hollis finally did return, he wed Richard's sister, who has since died. Hollis now determines to win March back, and she can't resist his single-minded pursuit. Hoffman conveys the mesmerizing lure of a lost love with haunting sensuality; but March's excuses for Hollis's violent personality and for his physical abuse of her and her teenaged daughter, Gwen, are well beyond the willed myopia of even obsessive love. Other love affairsbetween the housekeeper who raised March and the man who was her father's law partner; and between rebellious teenager Gwen (the best character by far, drawn with delightful realism) and March's reclusive brother's sonare described with much more insight and plausibility. The high drama of this novel, and Hoffman's assured and lyrical prose, may carry the day for readers who can accept the premise that a passionate obsession can make sweet reason, maternal protectiveness and the instinct for self-preservation fly out the window.

Library Journal

As this novel opens, March Murray Cooper returns to her hometown, ostensibly to bury the woman who raised her but needing to resolve the unfinished business of her youthful love for Hollis, from whom she has been separated for years. Hollis has now grown into a man embittered by loneliness. He has learned neither to forgive nor to forget, and March must discover whether he can ever learn to love. Hoffman (Practical Magic, LJ 12/94) takes great care here to examine the many facets of love and relationships, turning them like a prism to reflect on March and Hollis. Hoffman's evocative language and her lyrical descriptions of place contrast sharply with the emotional scars that her characters must uncover and bear. Her novel is a haunting tale of a woman lost in and to love; it will enthrall the reader from beginning to end. Highly recommended. Caroline M. Hallsworth, Cambrian Coll., Sudbury, Ontario

Courtney Weaver

[W]hat makes Alice Hoffman's fiction so consistently compelling? Is it her story lines, reminiscent of Harlequin romances but with occasionally peppery dashes of cultural savviness? Or is it her characters, Anne Tyler-esque in their oddities, but without the irony? Or perhaps it's that quasi-New Age voice, lulling you into a Marianne Williamson world where one's fate is left to the movements of the sun, the moon, the planets or just some unnamed Higher Being?

Hoffman's fans won't be disappointed by the airy-fairy Here on Earth, her 12th novel, which weaves all of Hoffman's usual themes into a dreamy, intricate family melodrama, complete with alcoholism, wife-beating, obsessional love and whiffs of murder. It's the story of March Murray, who returns to her ancestral home at Fox Hill in New England after spending decades away in "lemon-colored" Palo Alto. In tow is her difficult teenage daughter Gwen, who is described as "pretty ... in spite of all her sabotage." At issue is a death in the family, but we know that March is really back to face her old ghosts, this time in the form of her adopted brother Hollis, whom she has been obsessively thinking about ever since his disappearance 20 years earlier.

Confused? Don't be. Here on Earth, despite its convoluted plot threads and histories, is at heart a romance novel with a bite. As with a good made-for-TV movie, you can pretty much guess what will happen to poor old March, whose naivet￯﾿ﾽ is at best frustrating and at worst unlikable. Nor is it any surprise that Hollis -- with his black, snapping eyes, and whose exits are followed by a blast of cold wind -- reveals himself to be Evil Incarnate: Subtlety is not one of Hoffman's strong points.

Still, this novel's comfy, confident voice is enough to lure you into an armchair for the better part of an evening. Hoffman's world is a place where emotions become aromas: Longing is "the scent of grass on her pillow"; anger is a "scorching scent"; mourning is "the scent of roses sweet and ripe and sorrowful." Moons peep out behind trees, fox-colored dogs herald the advent of evil and dreams are to be courted and followed.

Hoffman relies on her readers suspending a certain amount of disbelief, which may lull her into thinking she can get away with some occasionally terrible writing. "One look from him is more substantial than the wooden bar she's leaning her elbows upon," Ms. Hoffman breathlessly writes when March spies Hollis for the first time. "It's realer than the bottles of whiskey lined up behind the counter; realer than the pull of fabric as Susie tugs on her jacket." Thankfully, descriptions like that are few and far between. Ms. Hoffman may have more in common with Robert James Waller than Robert Louis Stevenson, but Here on Earth is no toothless romance. It's curiously pleasurable, and reading it induces only a minimum of guilt. --Salon

Kirkus Reviews

From the author of Practical Magic (1995), among others, a kind of inside-out Bridges of Madison County in which the middle- aged mother of a teenager falls in love with a bad man, leaves her husband for him, and winds up abused and isolated. The results are predictably depressing.

It might seem that March Murray has purely sentimental reasons for leaving her apparently happy life in California (nice house, professor husband) to attend her former housekeeper's funeral in Jenkintown, Mass., the bleak, suffocatingly tiny town where she grew up. After all, Mrs. Dale did help March's father raise her after the girl's mother died, and she remained a loyal friend until her death. But anyone who knew March in her teenage years must suspect that her real reason for returning with sullen teenage daughter in tow is for a reunion with Hollis, the bad boy March was once inseparable from. An abandoned child and the product of a series of detention homes, Hollis was brought to the Murray house as a charity-case boarder when he was in his teens. He kept his own counsel, except when sending smoldering glances March's way. The two became lovers until a misunderstanding split them apart—March to marry the rich boy next door, Hollis to amass a fortune, marry March's sister-in-law, and survive her to wait, brooding, for March's return. Their heated reunion leads to the breakup of March's marriage, and, despite the warnings of practically everyone in town, March moves into Hollis's gloomy mansion, puts up with his neurotic possessiveness, and watches him scare her daughter back to California before she realizes that the Hollis she lives with now is nothing but the evil, heartless relic of the wounded boy she once loved.

A chilly, hopeless love story with an unhappy conclusion. Hard to see what readers will find to like in such a tale.