Review: White Horses: A Novel

White Horses: A Novel by Alice Hoffman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received a copy of this new release of Alice Hoffman's book, first published in 1999, in exchange for an honest review.

An early and imperfect Hoffman book, this novel manages, with Hoffman's lyrical writing style, to blend aspects of magical realism, the bad boy mythos, family dysfunction, and incest. One of the factors contributing to the imperfection of Hoffman's story is that few of the characters are likeable and even Teresa, the protagonist, evokes only our sympathy. The incestuous relationship she developed with her brother Silver, is carefully developed, and presaged from the beginning of the book in Teresa's cryptic attraction to Silver, who is an attractively unscrupulous bad-boy.

Magical realism seems unanchored and poorly developed in this book. Teresa's expression of her rose-scent, first provoked by her sleepy spells, or later by periods of her losing her sense of self in others, isn't ever explained and is one of the few aspects of magic in the book.

I felt like there was a thin story of relationships here and Hoffman wasn't clear about her goals in the novel. While not her best work, the luminous quality of her writing style is already well developed.

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