Alice Hoffman-Faithful

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Alice Hoffman.Alice has published 23 novels, three books of short fiction and eight children and young adult works. Some of her familiar works are Here on Earth, Practical Magic, At Risk, The Dovekeepers, The Museum of Ordinary Things and The Marriage of Opposites.Her latest book is Faithful published by Simon and Schuster.And Alice will be appearing at the Ambler Theater on November 3rd. A theater I have been going to since I was 13! Used to see a double feature on Saturday mornings for 35 cents including popcorn. Usually Vincent Price in Theater of Blood or Dr. Sardonicus.Faithful traces the journey of a girl, not yet a woman, who finds herself, at least in herself, guilty of a tremendous betrayal and its consequences when a car wreck, for which she really was not responsible, leaves her best friend Helene in a persistently vegetative state, ameliorated only by a certain ineffable miraculous aspect to her coma.Throughout the book, Shelby tries to come to grips, with varying amounts of success with her own minimal sense of self esteem and the unfortunate fact that she really is a very very good person. How to reconcile the two.Throughout this somewhat picaresque journey she comes across people, animals and Chinese food that help propel her along a path, sometimes one step forward two steps back, that seemingly without the assistance of fortune cookies leads her to, as one reviewer said, to recalibration. Or redemption, or to a new life.