The River King

Author: Hoffman, Alice

Brand: Penguin Random House

Color: Multicolor

Edition: Reissue

Binding: paperback

Format: Deckle Edge

Number Of Pages: 352

Release Date: 01-07-2001

Part Number: 9780425179673

Details: Product Description
A story about a small town's surface appearance and the truths submerged below from the New York Times bestselling author of The Rules of Magic.

People tend to stay in their place in the town of Haddan. The students at the prestigious prep school don't mix with locals; even within the school, hierarchy rules as freshman and faculty members find out where they fit in and what is expected from them. But there are minor collisions happening everywhere: An awkward boy, the son of a teacher, is flirting with a pretty classmate, the daughter of a convenience-store cashier. A photographer in plastic flip-flops and an overflowing backpack is about to marry a staid, ambitious historian. And when a body is found in the river behind the school, a local policeman named Abey Grey will walk into this enclosed world and upset it entirely...
Review
Praise for The River King

“Graceful, beguiling, and quirky...Reading her book is like having a dream that haunts even after we awaken.”—
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Rewarding…a novel not to be missed.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Set in and around an exclusive private school in fictional Haddan, Mass., bestselling author Hoffman’s latest novel flows as swiftly and limpidly as the Haddan River, the town’s mystical waterway…As ever, Hoffman mixes myth, magic and reality, addressing issues of town and gown, enchanting her readers with a many-layered morality tale and proving herself once again an inventive author with a distinctive touch.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Suspenseful and engrossing.”—Denver Rocky Mountain News
“It can be hard to find an example of good old-fashioned storytelling these days, but storytelling, refreshingly, is Alice Hoffman’s strength...The River King is full of wonderfully and satisfyingly odd twists and turns.”—The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including
The Rules of Magic,
Practical Magic, 
The Marriage of Opposites, 
The Red Garden, the Oprah’s Book Club selection 
Here on Earth, 
The Museum of Extraordinary Things, and 
The Dovekeepers. She lives near Boston.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Haddan School was built in 1858 on the sloping banks of the Haddan River, a muddy and precarious location that had proven disastrous from the start. That very first year, when the whole town smelled of cedar shavings, there was a storm of enormous proportions, with winds so strong that dozens of fish were drawn up from the reedy shallows, then lifted above the village in a shining cloud of scales. Torrents of water fell from the sky, and by morning the river had overflowed, leaving the school’s freshly painted white clapboard buildings adrift in a murky sea of duckweed and algae.
For weeks, students were ferried to classes in rowboats; catfish swam through flooded perennial gardens, observing the disaster with cool, glassy eyes. Every evening, at twilight, the school cook balanced on a second-story window ledge, then cast out his rod to catch dozens of silver trout, a species found only in the currents of the Haddan River, a sweet, fleshy variety that was especially delectable when fried with shallots and oil. After the flood subsided, two inches of thick, black silt covered the carpets in the dormitories; at the headmaster’s house, mosquitoes began to hatch in sinks and commodes. The delightful watery vistas of the site, a landscape abundant with willows and water lotus, had seduced the foolish trustees into building much too close to the river, an architectural mistake that has never been rectified. To this day, frogs can be found in the plumbing; linens and clothes stored in closets have a distinctly weedy odor, as if each article had been washed in river water and never thoroughly dried.
After the flood, houses in town had to be refloored and re-roofed; public buildings were torn down, then refashio

EAN: 9780425179673

Package Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.0 inches

Languages: English