Blue Diary (Wheeler Large Print Book Series (Cloth))

Rating:
Summary: It Could Have Been a Heart
Review: "Blue Diary" is Alice Hoffman's fourteenth novel, so one would think she would know better than to create such cliched and cardboard-cutout characters as the ones that people this story. I love Hoffman's lyrical, and sometimes hyperbolic prose however, so I decided to give "Blue Diary" a chance.

The plot of this book is not bad, but it's nothing to email your friends about, either. After thirteen years of marriage, and the birth of a son, an unsuspecting, but perfect wife, Jorie Ford, is shocked when her perfect husband, Ethan is arrested for the long-ago rape and murder of a teenaged girl. Even more shocking to Jorie is the fact that "Ethan" is not really "Ethan." He is Byron Bell, a sociopathic murderer.

Although I found the plot of "Blue Diary" rather trite, it was the characters that really made me dislike the book. Jorie is simply "too perfect." She is the perfect homemaker, the perfect mother, the perfect gardener. And even all this sweet perfection and outward domestic bliss would have been acceptable if Hoffman had not made Jorie so maddeningly clueless.

Come on! How many wives would be so naive as to not even wonder when their longtime husband had never once revealed even a hint of his life before marriage? Husbands who didn't reveal where they were born, who their families and friends were, where they went to school, etc.? I can tell you one wife who wouldn't bat a perfectly mascared eyelash at all this secrecy...Jorie Ford. It was maddening. I wanted to slap the woman to wake her up from her dreamworld. I have a feeling a slap wouldn't have helped, though. Jorie Ford is a woman who sees the world and everyone in it in terms of black and white. There are the "good guys" and there are the "bad guys." And clearly, she and Ethan have been the "very good guys."

Even more irritating is that fact that Hoffman attempts to couch her treacle in "small-town" warmth and fuzziness. Her omnisicent narrator moves here and there in a haze of clueless wonder that is second only to Jorie's. There is suspense in this storyline, make no mistake about that, the plot is not the problem here, it is the characters, Jorie, in particular.

If Hoffman had written a book in which a character such as Jorie wanted to explore her need for domestic perfection, then this might have actually worked. But even after (finally) realizing she's married a murderer and a liar, Jorie Ford, aka Jorie Bell, feels no such need. She simply accepts the fact that she's perfect and a bad man did a bad thing...to her. She's the wronged victim who takes absolutely no personal responsibility for her lack of perception. It wasn't her fault her husband was so bad, she thinks. It wasn't her fault he was so good at hiding his past from her. Sure. We hear you, Jorie.

The final blow comes when Hoffman, steeped in sentimentality, gives the dead teenager a birthmark at the base of her spine in the shape of a butterfly. I suppose it could have been worse. It could have been shaped like a heart.

Alice Hoffman usually writes more fanciful books and I think she's at her best in that realm. Her prose, even in this dreadful book, is lyrical and poetic and wonderful to read. Pretty prose, however, needs a little something more to back it up. If not a plot, then an original literary device, if not an original literary device, then a fascinating character, etc. Sadly, "Blue Diary" doesn't have any of these things. It's just treacle.

Rating:
Summary: Romantic imagery but little realism
Review: Can we really ever know anyone completely? Even the most loving and intimate partner of 13 years? Jorie, the protagonist of this lush novel, finds out the answer to this question, but she might have asked it much earlier, maybe at the wedding when his side of the chapel was completely empty. Hoffman is a talented writer, and I kept reading, with special interest in the sharply defined adolescent characters, but Jorie's ignorance about her husband's past is unreal and puts a hole in the plot too big to ignore.

Rating:
Summary: America's Most Haunted
Review: Ethan is the pillar of the community--a great husband and father, an honest carpenter, a baseball coach who never yells at 11-year-olds who err on the field, and a volunteer fireman who is known for taking death-defying risks to save lives. So it comes as a great shock to everyone who knows him when he is arrested on suspicion of an old unsolved murder. Well--a shock to everyone but Kat, the 12-year-old neighbor who provided the anonymous tip that got him arrested. So begins Alice Hoffman's Blue Diary, which explores how catastrophically this single event haunts Ethan's family, friends, and neighbors.

Blue Diary is a book that would be a 5-star read against 95 percent of what's on the bookshelf. Hoffman's stiffest competition, however, is her own work and Blue Diary doesn't come up to the standard of Practical Magic, Turtle Moon or the River King. Hoffman's prose is always clear and her stories always interesting, but the lush poetic imagery of earlier novels is missing in this one. Jorie (Ethan's wife) and Kat (the neighbor kid) are well-drawn characters, but a bit transparent compared to the masterfully painted characters of Hoffman's other books.

Nonetheless, Blue Diary makes for an interesting read which poses the thought-provoking question: how well do you really know anyone? and the paranoia-provoking corollary: how can you be so sure?