Page 61 - Phonebox Magazine October 2008

Book Review
By Oxfam Bookshop, Olney
The Probable Future by Alice Hoffman
Review by Sandra Metcalf
No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay
Through a dozen generations the women born into the Sparrow family of Unity, Massachusetts, have all develop some uncanny ability when they reach their 13th birthday. Elinor Sparrow can tell when someone is lying and her daughter Jenny can experience other people’s dreams. Jenny had married Will Avery on the strength of one such dream, running away with him to live in Boston, to escape her mother and her family's past. But when Jenny’s daughter, Stella, reaches her 13th birthday Jenny finds that running away – from a place, from other people, above all from the past, solves nothing. Stella’s gift is to see other people’s probable future. When she foresees the gruesome murder of a stranger and tells her father, Stella sets in motion a chain of events which forces her and her parents to return to Unity, and begins a process which unravels many past perceptions and re-aligns many people's lives.
This is a story about love, about young love and old love, about choices, about foresight and consequences; a story haunted by the scent of roses and the hum of bees as well as the pain of past mistakes. Hoffman is a mesmerising storyteller with an ability to blend magic so seamlessly and effortlessly into everyday life that you hardly think to question it – after all, if the annual return of spring isn’t magical, then what is? And we all accept that. Fall under the spell of this book and you will want to read others such as ‘Seventh Heaven', ‘Turtle Moon’, and ‘Second Nature’. K
ady
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A14 year old girl wakes up, bleary-eyed, after an evening she reconstruction for a news/entertainment
would rather forget. Not only had she missed her school night curfew of eight o’clock, she had lied about being at a friend’s house doing homework. Instead, she had been with her 17 year old boyfriend, drinking, before they parked at the Connecticut Post mall. It had been there that her father had found her, dragged her out of the car and taken her home.
To her surprise, the house is now totally quiet; no sound from her older brother, normally banging around at this time of the morning; no clatter of plates or muffled voices from the kitchen. After washing her face, she makes her way downstairs and stands in the kitchen doorway. There are no cereal boxes out, no juice, no coffee in the coffee maker, no plates, no mugs. The kitchen looks exactly as it had after her mother had cleaned up after dinner the night before. Worst of all, there is no note. The family has just disappeared without a trace.
Twenty-five years later the mystery is no nearer to being solved. A television company has persuaded Cynthia to take part in a
show ‘Deadline’, which investigates bizarre unsolved crimes from years past. This not only stirs up the memories never far from the surface of Cynthia’s mind, but provokes some unusual responses, including a letter which makes no apparent sense. Cynthia soon realizes that agreeing to the TV company’s request might have been the worst mistake she has ever made.
This is a first-class suspense story, one
which holds the reader’s attention from
beginning to end. The plot unravels before
Review by Thelma Shackl
our eyes, the mystery first deepening, until everything is finally
revealed. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute; but one word of
warning! Once you have started reading this book, you will find it
Text box format.
almost impossible to put down until you reached the final page! K
The books reviewed above are from Oxfam Books and Music, Olney, which sells donated books, records, CDs, tapes and music to raise money for Oxfam’s work in combating poverty around the world.
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Phonebox Magazine 61