The Probable Future Pdf is a Fantasy Magical Realism novel By Alice Hoffman. 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.
The probable Future Book Summary
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.
READ
The Marriage Of Opposites Pdf Summary Reviews By Alice Hoffman
The Red Garden Pdf Summary Reviews By Alice Hoffman
The Ice Queen Pdf Summary Reviews By Alice Hoffman
About Alice Hoffman Author Of The Probable Future Pdf
Alice Hoffman Author Of The Probable Future Pdf is an author of more than thirty works of fiction, including The World That We Knew; The Marriage of Opposites; The Red Garden; The Museum of Extraordinary Things; The Dovekeepers; Here on Earth, an Oprah’s Book Club selection; and the Practical Magic series, including Practical Magic; Magic Lessons; The Rules of Magic, a selection of Reese’s Book Club; and The Book of Magic. She lives near Boston.
The Probable Future pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (June 1, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345455916
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345455918
- Item Weight : 11.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.15 x 0.82 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #88,888 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,933 in Family Saga Fiction
- #6,096 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #8,588 in Suspense Thrillers
- Customer Reviews: 4.4 out of 5 stars 601 ratings
The Probable Future Book Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars The line between love and hate is very fine.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 8, 2022
Verified Purchase
Families are much more complex than what we believe. The invisible lines we create to protect ourselves from the love and hate of the family dynamic are rarely real. It takes something that can shake you to the core, before the falseness of the imagined problem can be washed away in a flood of tears.
4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Story
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 25, 2010
Verified Purchase
The Probable Future is the story of the Sparrow women, each of whom discovers their own unique ability on their 13th birthday. Though many Sparrow women are mentioned, the story mainly concerns the three latest generations. Elinor, the current matriarch, can discern liars; Jenny, the mother, dreams other people’s dreams; and Stella, the daughter can see the manner in which people will die. Along the way we learn a little about their infamous ancestor, Rebecca Sparrow, who was blessed (or cursed) with the inability to feel pain which lead to her demise at the hands of a suspicious mob.
Their unique gifts and long history in the town of Unity make the Sparrow women both a source of pride as well as the subject of rumor and assumptions. Desperate to escape the burden of her heritage and an un-loving mother, Jenny runs away with Will Avery an attractive young man who could charm anyone, with the exception of Elinor Sparrow who knew him to be a liar and a cheat the second she laid eyes upon him.
Jenny sacrifices her education in order to ensure that Will receives his, only to have Will squander his opportunity at Harvard University, which pretty much sets up a cycle which the couple repeats in various forms through the years. Eventually, Jenny and Will have a daughter. It is a difficult birth, but both the child and the mother survive. Jenny swears that her daughter will never learn of her heritage, and strives to be the kind of mother that she herself never had. Jenny’s efforts serve only to drive her daughter further away. Their relationship is further strained by the fact that Jenny has left Will, and he has moved out, since Stella practically worships her father.
Stella’s 13th birthday coincides with the onset of menstruation, and she begins to have graphic visions indicating a person’s manner of death. She sees a large fish trapped in her math teacher’s throat, a pea sized sphere in the brain of a cab driver, etc… Not understanding what she is seeing, Stella confides in the only person she feels that she can trust, her father.
When Stella predicts the murder of a woman in the restaurant he takes her to celebrate her birthday Stella urges Will to warn her of impending death. When the woman fails to take the vision seriously, Stella forces her father to do more in order to prevent the death. Will goes to the police to make a report, but the police don’t take him seriously either. When the murder occurs, Will becomes the prime suspect and the media descend on him and his family to get the story.
Jenny is forced to send her daughter to live with her grandmother in her ancestral home. When Jenny loses her job due to the scandal, she returns to her home as well to make a new start. With three generations of Sparrow women under one roof and the threat of the real murderer lurking in the darkness the women are forced to deal with their issues, lost loves, and the powers that they cannot deny.
I really enjoyed The Probable Future, I felt that it could very well be the story of distant cousins of the Owens women in Hoffman’s Practical Magic as the two novels bear a few striking similarities. Both stories concern the most recent in a long line of magical women, a very unique house, and the struggle to find and accept love.
Although the word witch appears only once in the whole book, there are hints that the women are witches, or have some knowledge of witchcraft. Rebecca Sparrow wanders out of the woods with only a bell, a compass, and wearing a silver star around her neck. Elinor Sparrow is accused of cursing people by sticking an onion with black headed pins, or driving chicken feathers through a knotted length of thread.
While the murder of a woman the author didn’t expend the effort to name moves the story along, the central plot of this book is the dynamic of the mother/daughter relationship. The Probable Future teaches us that the secret to a successful relationship is like one of the recipes in Rebecca Sparrow’s ancient cookbook. All the ingredients are there, we just have to add them in the right proportion. It takes a little sour to balance the sweet, a little heat can bring out flavor, but too much can burn the stew and leave a bitter taste in your mouth, and a dish left out in the cold overnight will often spoil……
4.0 out of 5 stars Magical & Lyrical
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 29, 2015
Verified Purchase
Let’s go for 4.5 stars on this one. I have a new love and it’s not that cashmere scarf I got for Christmas or the way my basset looks at me with those soulful brown eyes. It’s Alice Hoffman. Well, I don’t *know* her, but I like her writing.
THE PROBABLE FUTURE is one that has “spoken” to me for some time. While it was published over ten years ago, I had never read it till now. It clogged my “wish list” and “to be read” pile for awhile. Why I hadn’t started sooner, I don’t know. Sometimes, like the words we read, the ones we read need to be carefully cultivated. I picked it up and fell into her lyrical world of fictional New England town Unity and into the clutches of the Sparrow women.
The first half hooked me right away: disagreeable 12-year old Stella wakes up on her thirteenth birthday with a new gift: she can see how others are going to die. As if that isn’t creepy enough, she “sees” a woman at her birthday dinner get brutally murdered. I was under the spell that THE PROBABLE FUTURE would be a page-turning whodunit with elements of literary fiction and mysticism woven throughout.
It is and it’s not.
The middle third of the book focuses almost entirely on the Sparrow family in a small town of Unity tucked into the layers of Cake House, the historical home of which they originate; it’s the refuge for young Stella, whom after having these disturbing visions is shuttled away to out of safety.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say the story unraveled from there, but it took in a new focus: mother-daugher relationships, the past/history of a town and family. We begin to understand why the Sparrow women are the way they are (Stella’s mother has her own gift, as does the grandmother). I kept wondering about the initial hook: the murder of that woman.
Hoffman does get us back on track, but much of the murder stuff gets…well, buried and is less substantial. If you know this going in, then I think you’ll be fine.
The writing is superb–plenty of attention to detial, settings come alive, and a certain breath of confidence blown into each character. I did, however tire of the bee analogies, as well as that giant oak tree and peach trees brought by sailboat. The points were belabored and tiresome. Overall, I really liked this book, it made me think and it definitely has improved my overall storytelling in a magical sense.
Get A Copy Of The Probable Future Pdf or Paperback By Alice Hoffman
You can get A Copy Of The Probable Future Pdf or Paperback By Alice Hoffman from these online stores below.
