Book Review – Faithful by Alice Hoffman
Faithful by Alice Hoffman Also by this author: Practical Magic, The Rules of Magic
Published by Simon & Schuster on November 1st 2016
Genres: Contemporary Fiction
Pages: 272
Amazon
Goodreads
FTC Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. All opinions are my own.
Goodreads Synopsis:
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage of Opposites and The Dovekeepers comes a soul-searching story about a young woman struggling to redefine herself and the power of love, family, and fate.
Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend’s future is destroyed in an accident, while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt.
What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor, filled with emotion—from dark suffering to true happiness—a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world. A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls—including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.
Here is a character you will fall in love with, so believable and real and endearing, that she captures both the ache of loneliness and the joy of finding yourself at last. For anyone who’s ever been a hurt teenager, for every mother of a daughter who has lost her way, Faithful is a roadmap.
Alice Hoffman’s “trademark alchemy” (USA TODAY) and her ability to write about the “delicate balance between the everyday world and the extraordinary” (WBUR) make this an unforgettable story. With beautifully crafted prose, Alice Hoffman spins hope from heartbreak in this profoundly moving novel.
My Review of Faithful:
Alice Hoffman’s latest novel Faithful focuses on Shelby Richmond and the painful and emotional journey that she takes after a car accident leaves her best friend Helene brain dead. Shelby, who was driving the car that night, comes away from the accident relatively unscathed, and so is wracked by tremendous guilt that she has, in essence, killed her friend. The guilt eats away at Shelby to the extent that she repeatedly tries to take her own life and ends up in a psychiatric hospital. Even after checking out of the hospital, Shelby still basically just withdraws from her life. She gives up on high school and going to college, shaves her head, takes drugs, and hides in her parents’ basement most of the time, avoiding human contact as much as possible. Helene may be in a coma and kept ‘alive’ only by life support, but Shelby is just a shell of herself as well.
I have to say that this is probably one of the hardest books I’ve ever had to read, not because it’s difficult or poorly written, but rather, because the way Hoffman gets into Shelby’s head and portrays that gut wrenching sense of loss and guilt is so powerful that I felt myself getting sucked down with Shelby. The writing is just that powerful and authentic. I actually had to stop reading for a while because it was so upsetting and emotional draining for me. I almost didn’t go back to it either, but I ultimately really wanted to know if Shelby was going to be okay or not.
Once I was able to continue reading, I was relieved to see that Shelby does eventually start to climb out of the pit of misery she was trapped in. Her journey in the second half of the book is still an emotional roller coaster at times, as the human experience often is, but with the help of some unlikely characters – a homeless girl with a tattooed face, a motley assortment of dogs, a mysterious guardian angel who sends her beautiful postcards encouraging her to forgive herself and live, and a best friend that she meets while working in a pet store – Shelby starts to figure out how to move on from the guilt that has enveloped her for so long.
What I Loved:
Shelby – With Shelby, Hoffman has created a protagonist that I can definitely relate to. That car accident is something that could happen to any one of us at any time and I think most of us would react in similar ways to how Shelby did. How do you live with yourself when you believe that you have destroyed someone else’s life?
The Dogs! – It’s probably crazy to say this, but the dogs are my favorite characters in the book. If ever there was a book that shows the healing power of pets, and especially dogs, it’s this one. Shelby might have rescued The General, Blinkie, and Pablo from the horrible environments they were living in, but those dogs saved her just as much as she saved them. They give her purpose and focus where she had none, and they give her someone to love who will love her back unconditionally.
Maravelle and her kids – Maravelle is Shelby’s best friend from her job at the pet store. She’s a single mom trying to raise three kids on her own and has her hands full. Even with all of that, she still befriends Shelby, this scrawny little bald-headed loner girl. Maravelle and her family basically become Shelby’s second family and in many ways help her way more than her own family ever could. Like those crazy dogs, they show Shelby how to live, love, and just connect with people again.
The Anonymous Guardian Angel – I found this character fascinating as well, especially trying to guess who it could possibly be. How does this person know what Shelby is going through? Why do they care? Why are they so determined to help her through her struggles? I thought Hoffman added an interesting twist by having this little thread of mystery flow through the story.
What I Didn’t Love:
It might upset some people when I say this and there are probably many who won’t be bothered by it at all, but I found the whole situation with Helene unsettling. Her parents are obviously not ready to say goodbye to their daughter, even though her injuries are such that there’s no way she’s going to recover. They choose to keep her on life support in a hospital bed in their home for years. Their home becomes little more than a shrine where people line up to see Helene and ‘interact’ with her because it is said that to do so makes miracles happen. I know it’s a personal choice and I couldn’t even say what I would do if my own child ended up like Helene, but it was just disturbing to read.
Who Would I Recommend Faithful to?
I would recommend this to any reader who likes a book that is going to make them feel. It’s an emotional roller coaster and it’s not for the faint of heart. When Shelby is low, she is about as low as it gets. If you’ve suffered a loss of your own and have come back from it, I think you would feel a kinship to Shelby and her journey.
Rating: 4 stars
About Alice Hoffman
Alice Hoffman was born in New York City on March 16, 1952 and grew up on Long Island. After graduating from high school in 1969, she attended Adelphi University, from which she received a BA, and then received a Mirrellees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, which she attended in 1973 and 74, receiving an MA in creative writing. She currently lives in Boston.
Hoffman’s first novel, Property Of, was written at the age of twenty-one, while she was studying at Stanford, and published shortly thereafter by Farrar Straus and Giroux. She credits her mentor, professor and writer Albert J. Guerard, and his wife, the writer Maclin Bocock Guerard, for helping her to publish her first short story in the magazine Fiction. Editor Ted Solotaroff then contacted her to ask if she had a novel, at which point she quickly began to write what was to become Property Of, a section of which was published in Mr. Solotaroff’s magazine, American Review.
Since that remarkable beginning, Alice Hoffman has become one of our most distinguished novelists. She has published a total of twenty-three novels, three books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults. Her novel, Here on Earth, an Oprah Book Club choice, was a modern reworking of some of the themes of Emily Bronte’s masterpiece Wuthering Heights. Practical Magic was made into a Warner film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Her novel, At Risk, which concerns a family dealing with AIDS, can be found on the reading lists of many universities, colleges and secondary schools. Hoffman’s advance from Local Girls, a collection of inter-related fictions about love and loss on Long Island, was donated to help create the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA. Blackbird House is a book of stories centering around an old farm on Cape Cod. Hoffman’s recent books include Aquamarine and Indigo, novels for pre-teens, and The New York Times bestsellers The River King, Blue Diary, The Probable Future, and The Ice Queen. Green Angel, a post-apocalyptic fairy tale about loss and love, was published by Scholastic and The Foretelling, a book about an Amazon girl in the Bronze Age, was published by Little Brown. In 2007 Little Brown published the teen novel Incantation, a story about hidden Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, which Publishers Weekly has chosen as one of the best books of the year. Her most recent novels include The Third Angel,The Story Sisters, the teen novel, Green Witch, a sequel to her popular post-apocalyptic fairy tale, Green Angel. The Red Garden, published in 2011, is a collection of linked fictions about a small town in Massachusetts where a garden holds the secrets of many lives.
Hoffman’s work has been published in more than twenty translations and more than one hundred foreign editions. Her novels have received mention as notable books of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People Magazine. She has also worked as a screenwriter and is the author of the original screenplay “Independence Day,” a film starring Kathleen Quinlan and Diane Wiest. Her teen novel Aquamarine was made into a film starring Emma Roberts. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, Harvard Review, Ploughshares and other magazines.
Toni Morrison calls The Dovekeepers “.. a major contribution to twenty-first century literature” for the past five years. The story of the survivors of Masada is considered by many to be Hoffman’s masterpiece. The New York Times bestselling novel is slated for 2015 miniseries, produced by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, starring Cote de Pablo of NCIS fame.
The Museum of Extraordinary Things was released in 2014 and was an immediate bestseller, The New York Times Book Review noting, “A lavish tale about strange yet sympathetic people, haunted by the past and living in bizarre circumstances… Imaginative…”
Nightbird, a Middle Reader, was released in March of 2015. In August of this year, The Marriage Opposites, Alice’s latest novel, was an immediate New York Times bestseller. “Hoffman is the prolific Boston-based magical realist, whose stories fittingly play to the notion that love—both romantic and platonic—represents a mystical meeting of perfectly paired souls,” said Vogue magazine. Click here to read more reviews for The Marriage of Opposites.
Great review. Seems like a very emotional read. I dont think I am in the mood for a tear jerker now but I will keep it in mind especially since the book seems very good. I agree with you- very difficult to imagine how to react when a relative is on life support
Thanks! I thought it was very well written, but yes, emotionally intense, almost draining at the beginning. I stopped reading it for a while and switched over to some chick lit to lighten my mood, before going back to it.