Sonderbooks Book Review of The Probable Future

Reviewed August 16, 2003.

Doubleday, New York, 2003. 322 pages.
Available at Sembach Library (F HOF).
A Sonderbooks’ Stand-out of 2003: #6, Literary Fiction

Ever since the mysterious Rebecca Sparrow walked into the town of Unity, thirteen generations of Sparrow women have received a gift on their thirteenth birthday. For Stella Sparrow Avery, newly turned thirteen in Boston, the gift doesn’t bring her joy. She can look at a person and know how they are going to die.

This wasn’t the first time a gift has caused trouble. Stella’s mother Jenny received the gift of dreaming other people’s dreams. It was a dream the morning of her thirteenth birthday that made her feel she was destined to marry Will Avery, even if, in the years later, he never dreamed an interesting dream again. It was Jenny’s mother Elinor’s gift that told her that Will Avery was a liar, through and through. Certainly Jenny’s marriage to Will did not end happily.

When Stella is eating with her father and sees that a woman in the restaurant is going to die by a violent murder, she begs Will to do something. He goes to the police, who don’t do anything until the woman is indeed murdered. Then they arrest Will.

After that, events conspire to bring Stella, Jenny, and Elinor together, back in the stately Cake House in Unity.

This is a richly textured novel, about three generations of remarkable women, and about the history of the town of Unity and mistakes that can be corrected. There’s no simple straight-line plot structure here, but an intricate, interwoven fabric of relationships and events and lives of characters who seem completely real.

Reviews of other books by Alice Hoffman:
The Story Sisters
Blackbird House
The Foretelling
Nightbird

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Book Reviews by Sondra Eklund

*****The Probable Future*

by Alice Hoffman