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Monday, June 5, 2023

Property Of by Alice Hoffman - 1977 -280 Pages- Her Debut Novel


 Property Of by Alice Hoffman - 1977 -280 Pages- Her Debut Novel 


Alice Hoffman works I have so far read

The Marriage of Opposites- 2015
"Everything My Mother Taught Me" - 2016
"The Book Store Sisters" -2022
The Foretelling - 2006
"Conjure" - 2014
Aquamarine- 2001
The Ice Queen - 2006
Property Of -1977

 "On the Avenue in the bleak area where New York City blends into suburbia, the Orphans, their fast Fords and their Chevys 'coated by ice and leather and white dust', prepare to engage in deadly, intricately structured games of combat. It is a world of grotesque, horrifying violence, fear, bravado and drugs, redeemed in the minds of its inhabitants by codes of honour, by chivalrous intentions and by the purity of their struggle for power, dominance, territory. This is the setting of Alice Hoffman's unsparing and unsentimental novel. Her heroine, 17 years old, quick witted yet vulnerable, falls helplessly in love with McKay, the Orphan's 22 year old president and their doomed love story is told in desperate counterpoint to the punk lyrical flippancies of throbbing car radios and jukes." From Penguin Press

I have read several highly laudatory reviews for Property Of, Alice Hoffman's debut novel. I found some of the narrator's descriptions of life on the streets, of the impact of drugs, very elegant. Personally I found the subject matter of little interest and the characters the same. I finished Property Of because I am attempting a read through of her work. It became a Slough through for me. 

The reviews praising Property Of were all written long after she became one of America's most loved writers.

I will read at least one more work by Alice Hoffman this month, I hope.





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