Product Description

The women of the Sparrow family have lived in New England for generations. Each is born in the month of March, and at the age of thirteen, each develops an unusual gift. Elinor can literally smell a lie. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people’s dreams as they’re dreaming them. Granddaughter Stella, newly a teen, has just developed the ability to see how other people will die. Ironically, it is their gifts that have kept Elinor and Jenny apart for the last twenty-five years. But as Stella struggles to cope with her disturbing clairvoyance, the unthinkable happens: One of her premonitions lands her father in jail, wrongly accused of homicide. The ordeal leads Stella to the grandmother she’s never met and to Cake House, the Sparrow ancestral home full of talismans and fraught with history. Now three generations of estranged Sparrow women must come together to turn Stella’s potential to ruin into a potential to redeem.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69347 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-01
• Released on: 2004-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780345455918
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
-A thrilling adventure of literary alchemy . . . A magical, mystical tour de force of pure entertainment.-
-The Seattle Times

-Delicious . . . Hoffman is an unapologetic optimist, and optimism is in short supply these days. It feels like a vacation to curl up with [The Probable Future].-
-The New York Times Book Review

-Instantly alluring . . . A mysterious, modern-day fairy tale . . . Hoffman is an amazingly talented writer with a beautiful sense of sentence construction, an intriguing imagination, and the ability to create compelling, complex characters that readers care about.-
-Fort Worth Star-Telegram

-Hoffman-s ethereal tale of a family of women with supernatural gifts is a magical escape, grounded in the complex relationships between mothers and daughters.-
-Marie Claire

-HOFFMAN KNOWS HOW TO PUT MAGIC INTO HER NOVELS, sometimes as an element of the plot;
always in the quality of her writing.-
-The Hartford Courant

-The Probable Future dazzles with its bristling examination of life-s trying tests of the women of the Sparrow family. The electrifying result is an under-the-microscope look at love, friendship, and the ties that blind and bind.-
-The Seattle Times

-[A] bewitching story of gifted women unlucky at love . . . Hoffman is now expert at sketching the New England landscape in the past and future, and the equally chilly psychological landscape of extraordinary women trapped in an ordinary word. . . . She shows a deft hand at tracing the movement from child to adult, showing an unusual ability to create sympathetic characters of all ages.-
-Richmond Times-Dispatch

-Hoffman has perfected her very own entrancing style of magical realism and mystical romance anchored to th...

Review
“A thrilling adventure of literary alchemy . . . A magical, mystical tour de force of pure entertainment.”
—The Seattle Times

“Delicious . . . Hoffman is an unapologetic optimist, and optimism is in short supply these days. It feels like a vacation to curl up with [The Probable Future].”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Instantly alluring . . . A mysterious, modern-day fairy tale . . . Hoffman is an amazingly talented writer with a beautiful sense of sentence construction, an intriguing imagination, and the ability to create compelling, complex characters that readers care about.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“Hoffman’s ethereal tale of a family of women with supernatural gifts is a magical escape, grounded in the complex relationships between mothers and daughters.”
—Marie Claire

“HOFFMAN KNOWS HOW TO PUT MAGIC INTO HER NOVELS, sometimes as an element of the plot;
always in the quality of her writing.”
—The Hartford Courant

“The Probable Future dazzles with its bristling examination of life’s trying tests of the women of the Sparrow family. The electrifying result is an under-the-microscope look at love, friendship, and the ties that blind and bind.”
—The Seattle Times

“[A] bewitching story of gifted women unlucky at love . . . Hoffman is now expert at sketching the New England landscape in the past and future, and the equally chilly psychological landscape of extraordinary women trapped in an ordinary word. . . . She shows a deft hand at tracing the movement from child to adult, showing an unusual ability to create sympathetic characters of all ages.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Hoffman has perfected her very own entrancing style of magical realism and mystical romance anchored to the moody, history-laden Massachusetts countryside. . . . Hoffman’s newest cast of characters is unfailingly magnetic, from her eye-rolling teenagers to her wryly in-love seniors to her suddenly aflame fortysomethings, and the story she tells is as lush as it is suspenseful, as rich in earthy and sensuous detail as it is sweet and hopeful.”
—Booklist

“Hoffman is at her best, chronicling in meticulous and beautiful detail the ways the three Sparrow women are transformed . . . The characters are richly
drawn, each idiosyncratically real and yet each just a bit of a sorceress.”
—Book magazine (four stars)

“Full-bodied, wholly absorbing characters . . . Hoffman’s storytelling is as spellbinding as ever.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Spellbinding . . . Of all the magical realists writing today, she may have the best sense of balance.”
—Portland Oregonian

“Filled with vivid . . . characters and cinematic descriptions of New England landscapes, this book will be a hit.”
—Library Journal

“[A] lyrical, magic-infused work . . . Another witches’ brew of ethereal characters [and] lush settings.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Delicious . . . Like a piece of old-fashioned chocolate cake, Hoffman’s novel feeds a craving.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Delicious . . . Hoffman is an unapologetic optimist, and optimism is in short supply these days. It feels like a vacation to curl up with this fairy tale suffused with the ‘filmy green light’ of spring, smelling of ‘wild ginger and lake water,’ its sweetness balanced by deft touches of the Gothic.”
—The New York Times Book Review

From the Inside Flap

Alice Hoffman?s most magical novel to date?three generations of extraordinary women are driven to unite in crisis and discover the rewards of reconciliation and love.

Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people?s dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window on the future?a future that she might not want to see.

In The Probable Future this vivid and intriguing cast of characters confronts a haunting past?and a very current murder?against the evocative backdrop of small-town New England. By turns chilling and enchanting, The Probable Future chronicles the Sparrows?s legacy as young Stella struggles to cope with her disturbing clairvoyance. Her potential to ruin or redeem becomes unbearable when one of her premonitions puts her father in jail, wrongly accused of homicide. Yet this ordeal also leads Stella to the grandmother she was forbidden to meet and to a historic family home full of talismans from her ancestors.

Poignant, arresting, unsettling, The Probable Future showcases the lavish literary gifts that have made Alice Hoffman one of America?s most treasured writers.

Customer Reviews

Not Turtle Moon or Practical Magic - but still Hoffman
The Probable Future opens in familiar Alice Hoffman territory: in a New England town, Jenny Sparrow frets over the legacy her daughter Stella will receive upon waking on her thirteenth birthday. All Sparrow woman - and they are all women - find their one "talent", always something magical or supernatural, on this day. The first Sparrow, Rebecca, could not feel pain while Jenny's mother Elinor can instantly detect a lie. Jenny herself dreams other people's dreams. In true Hoffman fashion, the gift Stella receives affects not only the direction of her life but of those who love her - Jenny, Elinor, Jenny's errant ex-husband Will; Will's brother Matt; Liza, the owner of the town tea house; Hap, Stella's new best friend; and Brock Stewart, Elinor's doctor and companion.

While parts of this novel are groaningly familiar, Hoffman deftly moves from these moments to something more solid and truthful. The author has her own gift, that of confident narration. Her characterizations are memorably detailed, with the portrayal of Brock Stewart perhaps the most touching I have encountered in her fiction. Unlike in Turtle Moon and Practical Magic, the magic realism here is not as much a crucial part of the story as it is an overlay. Even though Stella's gift does prompt a journey back to the Sparrows, the reasons seem forced and the action unnecessary. This story would be every bit as moving without the Sparrow women's gifts, fireflies that ignite, and bees that demand politeness. Some fans might be disappointed by the lack of seamless integration of magic and realism in this novel, but others will be thankful the author did not force it upon a story which has its most honest moments between ordinary people. Love and the author's literary expressions of its intricacies figure heavily, verging on sentimentality, but again, Hoffman seems to instinctively know when to abandon this direction just her writing is in danger of becoming maudlin.

Turtle Moon and Practical Magic remain Alice Hoffman's most inventive novels; however, The Probable Future has its own charms. Quiet, loving, and upbeat, this novel is more likely to appeal to women than to men.

An enjoyable lazy-afternoon read
The Sparrows are a family of women who've lived in a small Massachusetts town since colonial times, their lives enlivened by a magical gift (different for each of them) that first manifests itself on their thirteenth birthdays. As is often the case with magic, the term "gift" is applied here fairly loosely. In the present day, Elinor always knows a lie, her daughter Jenny experiences other people's dreams, and granddaughter Stella, just turned thirteen, has developed the ability to see how people will die. The relationship-wrecking potential of the first two gifts is of course blindingly obvious, and the third would be a heavy burden for anyone to bear-especially a thirteen-year-old who's not speaking to the mother who's screwing up their relationship by trying to avoid all of her mother's mistakes.
These are well-drawn characters who often inspire, simultaneously, the desire to give them tea and crackers and the desire to knock their heads together. Jenny is completely justified and utterly wrong-headed in her resentment of her mother; so is Stella. Jenny is absolutely correct in having concluded, after having it pounded into her head repeatedly, that Stella's father, Will Avery, is a lying, cheating (...)who can be relied on only to let everyone down. Stella is also right in believing him to be a loving, devoted parent who actually listens to her, which her mother does not.
There is a plot in here, involving Stella's gift of seeing deaths accidentally landing Will in jail, charged with murder, but the plot is not the point. The focus of this book is the engaging, and ultimately optimistic, story of the tangled relationships of the Sparrow women and their friends and relations.
An enjoyable lazy-afternoon read.

I wish I wrote this book...
I'll tell you reading some of the reviews on this site, I thought, wow, this is a hard audience to please! Hoffman has so many plot lines, and all of the characterization felt deep and well-thought out. But the thing is, I didn't stop to notice this during the book, because I was just into the story.

I disagree that Will Avery was unbelievable. Everyone knows a slacker in life who works so hard to get away with not working. I also loved the magical elements -- and how it made you think, you know, being mortal -- not such a bad thing.

Really great read!