THE STORY SISTERS
Alice Hoffman
Shaye Areheart Books
Fiction
ISBN: 9780307393869
Though many fairy tales have been watered down over the generations --- their first, darker versions altered to make them brighter and happier --- you can still find the originals preserved in collections by the Grimm Brothers and others. Modern storytellers often use fairy tale conventions to tell their own tales, especially if a certain kind of danger or fearful innocence exists in the story. Fairy tale figures, evil forces, beautiful children, strong heroes, enchanted lands and mystical creatures are used to express a fractured reality, a broken mind, a damaged heart, or simply an alternate way of viewing the world.
In her latest novel, the prolific Alice Hoffman plays with the idea of a twisted fairy tale as a trio of sisters, in their imaginations and in reality, try to come to terms with tragedy, pain and deep secrets. In THE STORY SISTERS, Elv, Meg and Claire seek out love and acceptance, power and invisibility and, finally, peace and redemption.
The Story sisters were beautiful and smart. Elv was the oldest; strong and daring, she was known as the beauty of the three, but was also unstable, unpredictable and moody. Meg, the serious middle sister and a quiet bookworm, was growing into the kind of powerful beauty her older sister possessed. At 12, Claire was warm and caring, quick to please but wracked with a guilt that leaves her emotionally beholden to Elv. It all goes back to a secret Elv and Claire share of the trauma Elv suffered when she foiled a pedophile’s plans to abduct Claire. Elv was taken instead and was hurt and abused in ways she could never express, instead turning inward and creating a secret and magical landscape for her and her sisters to live in. The secret world was called Arnelle and its language Arnish. Within its fairy tale borders, Elv tried to keep herself and her sisters safe from further harm.
But Arnelle was not real enough, and as she grew older, Elv became more and more self-destructive until she found chemical ways to alter her reality and try to leave her pain behind. Often estranged from her family, she was unable to care for her younger sisters, who both fear her and fear for her. Over the years the girls move between their New York home and their familial home in Paris (populated by two fairy godmother-like women). Longing for understanding, comfort and magic, they draw people into their lives who are both harmful and healing. In THE STORY SISTERS, Hoffman re-imagines the familiar fairy tale narrative in a modern coming-of-age story. The princes, supernatural experiences and magical animals remain, but present too are drugs, teenage sex, car crashes and depression.
Hoffman’s prose is lovely, often finding the rhythms and cadences of traditional fairy tales and storytelling. The girls are compelling characters, and readers will surely feel for them as they grow up with so much hurt and so much promise. As Elv has a more difficult time coping, Arnelle becomes darker and scarier, and finally she inhabits it alone as her sisters abandon her to the place. Her downward trajectory is brutal and yet interestingly written. Some of the characters, however, are not fleshed out enough. As in so many fairy tales, the girls’ parents remain almost non-entities (especially their father), and while the emotional isolation adds to the story, it doesn’t lend it a realistic feel. Hoffman heaps tragedy upon tragedy on the girls, and by the end it is exhausting and somewhat unfulfilling: readers may have a hard time dealing with the sheer amount of loss, death, destruction and violence present in the story. Happy endings here, like in those sinister fairy tales of old, are relative.
THE STORY SISTERS, reminiscent of traditional tales both cautionary and entertaining, is a gloomy and romantic book perfect, despite its often oppressive darkness, for stormy and gloomy summer nights.
--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman
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