Rating: 
Summary: A Pleasurable Read
Review: The River King, by Alice Hoffman is a well-rounded book. There is the right amount of sentiment, tragedy, and suspense to balance the plot and the overall experience of the book. While this particular work does not excel in any of these categories, it is a nice combination.
It is set around the late 1990's at a private high school in the small town of Haddan, Massachusetts. The main story follows the lives of an incoming freshman, a new photography teacher, and a local police officer. Everything plays out in a continuous cycle of events that intertwine and include the past and the present.
While The River King may not be the intellectual thriller of Conrad, or have the wildly imaginative characters like in Faulkner, it is good writing for our day and age. The themes are modern and the story is life-like. I would recommend it as a good book to read for pleasure.
Rating: 
Summary: Déja vou
Review: The scent of roses permeates the campus, making weak preppie girls sick and jittery and driving young, unusual and wild photography teacher Betsy Chase into the arms of a local policeman with a complicated family history and piercing blue eyes. The aroma is the calling card of the influence of Betsy's predecessor, Annie Howe, a woman betrayed by the man she wanted to love, driven to self-destruction by his rejection. The setting is different, an unfamiliar (even to a prep schooler born and raised) boarding school, but Alice Hoffman never strays far from her small, close-nit communities, quiet little towns with politics and long memories, whether they be achingly new developments or established Massachusetts tourist villages. You see, before I even picked up this book, I'd already read it, because I'd already read two other books by Alice Hoffman: "Practical Magic" and "Seventh Heaven". "The River King" is simply a clever meshing of the two. The similarities are blatantly noticeable; if she hadn't written the first two books herself I'd accuse her of borderline plauguarization. Every character in River King has a long-lost relative residing in one of the other books, from Annie Howe, the depressed gardener, whose love story mirrors that of the first Owens Witch in "Practical Magic" (as well as lending both a convenient warning story for one character to blatantly miss and an even more convenient long-lost parentage for another), to Betsy, whose attitudes and rocky but fated and inevitable love for reckless and unorthodox small-town cop Abe are quite similar to those of Sally Owens, so fell in love with the southern detective sent to shake her sister down for the murder of a missing boyfriend. Sally's teenage daughter, and to some extent her reckless sister Gillian (whose evil boyfriend's spirit's tendency to drive people crazy with the scent of the lilacs that flourished over his illicit gravesite sounds somehow familiar), both contribute ot the formation of odd, entracingly beautiful, and incredibly stupid Carlin Leander, who, despite all the time and effort Hoffman must have invested to make her a sympathtic character, lost me when she continued to date big murderer on campus Harry McKenna long after we knew he was bad news. So here's my advice: skip "Seventh Heaven", which was boring and provincial, unless of course you love that sort of thing. Hoffman does excell at painting elaborate pictures of small-town society, I'll give her that. If you're the sex-and-magic type of reader, you can still get the small-town stuff (which gets very old the third time around), plus far more exciting fare, in "Practical Magic" (skip the movie though, as it is, like many adaptations, truly inferior.) If you're too lazy to read both books, "The River King" will do, but be advised that it is, like Carlin and Betsy and the ridiculously over-dramatized town of Haddan and its accompanying school, a pale shadow of its predecessors.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining... could've been more satisrying
Review: This book is uneven. I plan to read more of Alice Hoffman's books, and I thoroughly enjoyed this (I listened to it on tape). But the flaws that came to the surface (to use an appropriate metaphor) almost overrode the pleasure. Slightly reminiscent of The Secret History, The River King deals with undercurrents in and around a small New England prep school. As two of the central characters, Carlin and Gus, meet in their first year at the school, we are intrigued by the background of the school and the pressure that's placed on them both to fit into the student body. Hazing pranks and ordeals that turn deadly result in tragic death, which is investigated by a local cop who carries a lot of baggage of his own. His involvement with a teacher at the school further complicates the story and his life. Magical realism - a whiff of the supernatural - informs the book and the behavior of the characters that knew or want to know about the victim's death. The Good
- Alice Hoffman's writing style and dialog works - a small example are some of the sentences that come out of Eric (Betsy's fiance)'s mouth. We know pretty early on that he's a soulless academic, totally wrong for her.
- The magical elements are wonderfully portrayed, even if they don't exactly go anywhere. What's the point of all the minnows? And the sightings of all of the dark shadows and figures in the photographs?
- The death of one of the minor characters is depicted wondefully and is extremely moving. This passage is a tour de force of evocative writing.
- The symmetry and contrast of the love stories: Carlin and Gus, Betsy and Abel, and others.
- Things like the cat and its peripheral role in illustrating Harry's character. (But can we get over the rose motif? Please?). The Bad
- This plot doesn't resolve as so much end. The really bad guy is let off the hook, for one, but in general, the cruelty and insensitivity of some of the surrounding characters in charge (Bob Thomas, the head of the school, Eric, the house parent at Chalk House) is never brought home to them or to anyone else. As a result, one is left with a bad taste in one's mouth. It's not always necessary for justice to be done, but at least give us some dramatic irony when it's denied.
- Back to the plot and the exposition near the end: what possibilities there were for the investigation to meet up with either a fortuitous chain of evidence, or, better yet, a conspiracy member who turns! What drama was shortchanged by the decision to merely lay out the facts of the victim's final night alive in narrative style, rather than to have it be discovered, deduced, or confessed to. It's as if at some point, Ms. Hoffman had been planning to call P.D. James, Elizabeth George, or another expert murder mystery writer, on how to get the facts out in the open (like there was any mystery in the first place) and couldn't find anyone to consult with. As it is, what curiousity we have isn't so much satisfied as grudgingly allowed to be answered - it's not far from "Oh, by the way, here's how the victim died". (It's not quite on the same order as waking up and finding it had all been a dream but has a bit of the same downer effect).
- The chronology in the story was hard to reconcile with the pace. Things seem to happen all at once, then a few weeks go by, then another flurry of events, then another few weeks ...
- Finally, I've never read a book that actually had too much back story, but if anything, this is it. There are so many allusions to Abel (the cop)'s brother's death, the suicide of a faculty member's wife a long time ago, and Abel's background as a womanizer, that, upon smelling one of these digressions coming, one wants to duck and shout,"You're losing the plot here!" In the end, I'm interested in reading more by this author. I really like her style, characterization, and use of imagery; this latter makes it almost immaterial whether there are supernatural elements at play. In contrast to another reviewer, I would love to see this as a movie, although the amount of reframing and just plain major surgery that would be necessary would make it almost unrecognizable. I'm pretty sure Alice Hoffman wouldn't be pleased with the result. But there are excellent possibilities for this in the right hands.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: This book missed the mark for me. I did read it, but I did not find it necessarily engaging. I think that this may have been targeted for a younger audience. It was dark in an odd way - not like Practical Magic, however. I felt a little cheated when I finished the book - I did not have that 'good' feeling that comes after having read a 'good' book. I do appreciate Alice Hoffman's talent, but I did not feel this book showcased it as well as others have. I much preferred A Probable Future.
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