here on earth by alice hoffman

The Summary (Goodreads):
In Here on Earth, the darker, obsessive side of love is revealed in all of its power, and with all the havoc it wreaks.

After nearly twenty years of living in California, March Murray, along with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, returns to the sleepy Massachusetts town where she grew up to attend the funeral of Judith Dale, the beloved housekeeper who raised her. Yet returning to her hometown also brings her back to Hollis, March s former soul mate and lover. March s father had taken the teenaged Hollis, an abandoned child, and the product of a series of detention homes, into his house as a boarder, and treated him like a son. Yet March and Hollis s passionate love was hardly a normal sibling relationship. When Hollis left her after a petty fight, March waited for him three long years, wondering what she had done wrong.

Encountering Hollis again makes March acutely aware of the choices that she has made, and the choices everyone around her has made including Mrs. Dale, who knew more of love than March could ever have suspected, and her brother Alan, whose tragic history has left him grief-struck, with alcohol as his only solace. Her attraction to Hollis is overwhelming and March jeopardizes her marriage, her relationship with her daughter and her own happiness in an attempt to reclaim the past.

My Thought on This:

I don't know whether I like or I dislike the book. The book was in Oprah's Book Club list back in 1999. I don't know why I read this from the start but I knew why I took so long to finish it. The only book I've read by hers was The Practical Magic. At least I like that one. This one, is beyond my imagination and when I said that means this one is likely not really good. Maybe it's because I don't like what it is all about.

Although the plot line seems interesting and promising, the book couldn't have been more *boring*. There, i said that. It's quite bizarre, I never figured out if the bad guy was really the devil or just a jerk. The main character was such an awful mother, putting her sex life ahead of her kids, I never identified with her or had any compassion. It is a frightening tale of how an otherwise self-sufficient woman can be sucked into an abusive love relationship. Some kind of dark romance.nThe woman comes back into contact with an old lover who had a strange hold over her when she was younger. It's an oddly compelling story.There are some characters, the teenagers, Gwen and Hank, prove to be the strongest characters in the novel, thank God.

Maybe the best part is because it makes you reflect on your own past relationships and question if you really have closure, or if you just forced yourself to block it out and forget the people you once loved. Of course, the book took an interesting turn, but not the kind of love story it started out to be.

Overall, not really what I had expected. I was planning to rate this as a "???", but the last 80 pages gave it an extra boost/credit.

My Rating:

Emm..ok