From Publishers Weekly
In the full flowering of her extraordinary talent, Hoffman has produced a wise, poignant and uplifting novel luminous with the sensitive evocation of ordinary lives. The setting is a Long Island, N.Y., housing development from 1959 to 1960, a place of conforming, happy families where husbands mow the lawns of the tract houses and wives meet for coffee, where "safety hung over the neighborhood like a net." The arrival of Nora Silk, a brassy divorcee with two young children, is the catalyst for disturbing changes and events, some of them violent. Plucky, impetuous, innocently seductive and a messy housekeeper, Nora is anathema to the subdivision wives, who ostracize her and whose children torment her eight-year-old clairvoyant son, Billy. But as Nora's presence disturbs the community, it is slowly revealed that behind the identical facades of the houses are secret lives of turmoil, restlessness and longing. As in all Hoffman novels, mundane existence is disrupted in surprising ways: families disintegrate, a teenager dies, a placid housewife disappears. And ultimately Nora, whose optimism about her dead-end life is unquenchable, becomes an instrument of healing. Hoffman has intuitive grasp of the thoughts and feelings that are masked by conventional behavior. Like some of her characters, she seems to have a spooky ability to read thoughts; how else to account for her unerring understanding of people of nearly every age and across a broad social spectrum? She has a gift for perceiving the cruelty of children and the wide gulf that yawns between the most loving, attentive parents and their offspring's unknown wishes and deeds. As usual, she tells more than a compulsively readable story. She does magic, she unsettles you and she leaves you feeling emotionally purged and satisfied. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selections. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In felicitously recording the lives of newcomers-on-the-block Nora Silk and her sons, baby James and young Billy, Hoffman proves once again that she can tell a charming story about suburbia that is, at once, mundane and oddly transcendent. Nora, a young, sexy divorcee, moves to the suburbs of New York City following her divorce (in 1959 a scandalous event). All alone, she manages work, her sons, and assorted domestic responsibilities with quirky flair, if not thoroughness (and occasional help from assorted magic spells inherited from her grandfather). Hoffman takes the reader back to that apparently innocent time and into a "nice" neighborhood, where the sunny replicated exteriors of the houses hide sometimes desperate lives within. Nora and her neighbors signal lifestyles of the future: a woman walks out on her family, another goes back to work; a boy is abused and strikes back; a father leaves home. Combining reality with magic, this novel surpasses At Risk (LJ 7/88). It should attract a wide readership. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selections; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/90.- Lauren Bielski, New YorkCopyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
When divorcée Nora Silk moves to Long Island with her two small sons, the neighbors ignore her and her attempts to be friendly. After time and small miracles, changes occur, bringing a different aura to all their lives. Roberta Germaine has a good reading voice. Under her stewardship the story could flow, but she's more an actress than a reader, and she stops the action by giving each character a very separate sound. As a result, the book that Alice Hoffman has written is secondary to Germaine's desire to leave her own imprint. J.P. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister
It is 1959, in a Long Island suburb. Hemlock Street consists of identical houses, all six years old. Everyone is married, has the same values, thinks the same thoughts. Into this community comes Nora Silk - wearing black stretch pants when all the mothers wear Bermuda shorts, bringing with her a son who reads people's minds, a baby, and no husband. Maybe she is a witch; certainly she is not a regular mother. Her idea of cooking revolves around Twinkies and food coloring, even if she does love her children. As the reality of Nora slowly but irresistibly opens the eyes of the neighborhood to the limitations of their own lives and values, marriages begins to show their cracks and hidden strains become visible for the first time. Potentially, Seventh Heaven could have been a horribly depressing book. Abused children kill their parents; teenagers die in accidents; mothers walk out the door in the middle of the night and do not return. Yet Alice Hoffman makes the opening of eyes a good and worthwhile thing. Not everyone survives, not everyone is happy. But there is a feeling - embodied in Nora - that happiness, and even unhappiness, is better than marriages with no love, or houses that all look alike. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.


Washington Post Book World
A consummate joy...magical.

ANNOTATION

Hoffman takes readers to a typical surburban community in the 1950s to explore what happens when a strong, passionate, and mysterious woman comes to town: everyone is touched by her, and in the mirror of her magnetism, people see themselves as they never have before. "A consummate joy."--Washington Post Book World.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"SEVENTH HEAVEN confirms her place as one of the finest writers of her generation."
NEWSWEEK
Nora is ahead of her time. A single mother in 1950s suburbia, she's strong, sexy, passionate, and mysterious. Everyone in town is touched by her, and in the mirror of her magnetism, people see themselves as never before. With Nora's courageous image before them, they begin to ask themselves questions they had never asked—finding answers they had never dared to imagine....
"Brilliant and astonishing...Suffused with magic."
COSMOPOLITAN

FROM THE CRITICS

Washington Post Book World

A consummate joy...magical.

Publishers Weekly

In the full flowering of her extraordinary talent, Hoffman has produced a wise, poignant and uplifting novel luminous with the sensitive evocation of ordinary lives. The setting is a Long Island, N.Y., housing development from 1959 to 1960, a place of conforming, happy families where husbands mow the lawns of the tract houses and wives meet for coffee, where ``safety hung over the neighborhood like a net.'' The arrival of Nora Silk, a brassy divorcee with two young children, is the catalyst for disturbing changes and events, some of them violent. Plucky, impetuous, innocently seductive and a messy housekeeper, Nora is anathema to the subdivision wives, who ostracize her and whose children torment her eight-year-old clairvoyant son, Billy. But as Nora's presence disturbs the community, it is slowly revealed that behind the identical facades of the houses are secret lives of turmoil, restlessness and longing. As in all Hoffman novels, mundane existence is disrupted in surprising ways: families disintegrate, a teenager dies, a placid housewife disappears. And ultimately Nora, whose optimism about her dead-end life is unquenchable, becomes an instrument of healing. Hoffman has intuitive grasp of the thoughts and feelings that are masked by conventional behavior. Like some of her characters, she seems to have a spooky ability to read thoughts; how else to account for her unerring understanding of people of nearly every age and across a broad social spectrum? She has a gift for perceiving the cruelty of children and the wide gulf that yawns between the most loving, attentive parents and their offspring's unknown wishes and deeds. As usual, she tells more than a compulsively readable story. She does magic, she unsettles you and she leaves you feeling emotionally purged and satisfied. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selections. (Aug.)

Library Journal

In felicitously recording the lives of newcomers-on-the-block Nora Silk and her sons, baby James and young Billy, Hoffman proves once again that she can tell a charming story about suburbia that is, at once, mundane and oddly transcendent. Nora, a young, sexy divorcee, moves to the suburbs of New York City following her divorce (in 1959 a scandalous event). All alone, she manages work, her sons, and assorted domestic responsibilities with quirky flair, if not thoroughness (and occasional help from assorted magic spells inherited from her grandfather). Hoffman takes the reader back to that apparently innocent time and into a ``nice'' neighborhood, where the sunny replicated exteriors of the houses hide sometimes desperate lives within. Nora and her neighbors signal lifestyles of the future: a woman walks out on her family, another goes back to work; a boy is abused and strikes back; a father leaves home. Combining reality with magic, this novel surpasses At Risk (LJ 7/88). It should attract a wide readership. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selections; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/90.-- Lauren Bielski, New York

AudioFile - Jocelyn Pollard