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Follow-up on Alice Hoffman
Aug. 20th, 2019 05:57 pmWell, I read The Rules of Magic avidly, and the prose (the sentence-to-sentence, paragraph-to-paragraph writing skill) remained very good. The characters were interesting but not as well fleshed out as I would have liked. (And that's odd, since really it's all about the characters.) The story was kind of...only tenuously a story.
I know that Hoffman does typically write speculative fiction/magical realism. It nevertheless read to me like an example of speculative fiction written by writers who don't usually write SFF, for readers who don't usually read it. (The Children of Men, The Time-Traveler's Wife, etc.). It's a genre that usually doesn't work very well for me and sometimes makes me cranky - though not with the writers so much as with the publishing industry.
I'm not sorry I read it, I did enjoy it, and I probably won't reread it - and that says a lot, because most things I like, I reread until I wear holes through the text with my eyes.
I know that Hoffman does typically write speculative fiction/magical realism. It nevertheless read to me like an example of speculative fiction written by writers who don't usually write SFF, for readers who don't usually read it. (The Children of Men, The Time-Traveler's Wife, etc.). It's a genre that usually doesn't work very well for me and sometimes makes me cranky - though not with the writers so much as with the publishing industry.
I'm not sorry I read it, I did enjoy it, and I probably won't reread it - and that says a lot, because most things I like, I reread until I wear holes through the text with my eyes.
