One of Alice Hoffman's Best

Five stars! The book is a love story and thriller. Set on a small island off Long Island, the story confronts small town attitudes about people who are different. It also made me think about how lives can be upended and set on different trajectories. I was left pondering...what might have been? ( )

I struggled through the beginning -- the boring introduction of a feral man to modern society, the tedious entrance of the stubborn heroine who rescues the Wolfman from a psychiatric ward, the over-explained background histories for both of them -- until I got to page 55 and this line:

"He'd already realized he could not begin to understand the things men did; now he saw women were even harder to figure out. Sometimes it almost seemed as if they were thinking one thing and talking about something else completely, and you didn't know what to believe: the thing they said or the thing they didn't say."

And that's when I realized that there was nothing on Earth that could make me read further. ( )

A surprising perspective on human nature. ( )

One of Alice Hoffman's Best

Five stars! The book is a love story and thriller. Set on a small island off Long Island, the story confronts small town attitudes about people who are different. It also made me think about how lives can be upended and set on different trajectories. I was left pondering...what might have been? ( )

I hope that eventually I'll be able to read all the books written by Alice Hoffman. I certainly have a long way to go but managed to quickly read Second Nature. I liked the well-developed characters, the concept, and of course, the writing style. She usually writes with more mysticism than she did in this novel, but she has written a novel that I enjoyed very much. It has depth, emotion, suspense, realistic settings, and a secret, sad romance.

Alice Hoffman knows how to write about human nature. This novel has several story lines among its characters and they all deal with how we react to various situations in our lives. Thought-provoking book. ( )