Magic Hour: A Novel
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Customer Rating : List Price :$7.99
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Magic Hour: A Novel Overviews
Deep in the Pacific Northwest lies the Olympic National Forest– nearly one million acres of impenetrable darkness and impossible beauty. Even in this modern age, much of it remains undiscovered and uncharted. From the heart of this old forest, a six-year-old girl appears. Speechless and alone, she can give no clue as to her identity, no hint of her past. . . .
Until recently, Dr. Julia Cates was one of the preeminent child psychiatrists in the country, but a scandal shattered her confidence, ruined her career, and made her a media target. When she gets a desperate call from her estranged sister, Ellie, a police chief in their small western Washington hometown, she jumps at the chance to escape.
In Rain Valley, nothing much ever happens–until a girl emerges from the deep woods and walks into town. She is a victim unlike any Julia has ever seen: a child locked in a world of unimaginable fear and isolation.
When word spreads of the “wild child” and the infamous doctor who is treating her, the media descend on Julia and once again her competence is challenged. State and federal authorities want to lock the girl away in an institution until an identification can be made.
But to Julia, who has come to doubt her own ability, nothing is more important than saving the girl she now calls Alice. To heal this child, Julia will have to understand that she cannot work alone and must look to others–the people in the town she left long ago, the sister she barely knows, and Dr. Max Cerrasin, a handsome, private man with secrets of his own.
Then a shocking revelation forces Julia to risk everything to discover the truth about Alice. The ordeal that follows will test the limits of Julia’s faith, forgiveness, and love, as she struggles to ascertain where Alice ultimately belongs.
In her most ambitious novel to date, Kristin Hannah delivers an incandescent story about the resilience of the human spirit, the triumph of hope, and the mysterious places in the heart where love lies waiting.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Magic Hour: A Novel
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Magic Hour: A Novel CustomerReview
I’ve been a fan of Kristin Hannah since her first book. She writes such real characters that you can’t help but love/hate them. No cardboard characters for Hannah. The Magic Hour is such an fascinating book, taking me on a journey into the life and mind of a feral child, that I couldn’t put it down. There’s nothing better than being so into a book that you can’t put it down even when you realize you’ll be running on less than the optimum hours of sleep the next day. This is what reading is all about. Romance, intrigue, suspense and a glimpse into the dynamics of a small Washington State town.
Hannah really does her homework. Her descriptions of the town where the two Cates sisters live is spot-on. I happen to live in Western Washington and Hannah described the rain forest coast town with it’s logger and fishermen to perfection. I learned so much about the phenomenon of the feral children, that I can’t imagine how much research Hannah would have had to do to make her descriptions ring so true. Seeing into the head of Alice, the young girl who wanders into town with her wolf pup, afraid of people but nothing in nature was so interesting. It really added texture to an already great story. Every main character had their secrets and grew as the story moved along towards its climax. Totally satisfying. This is my favorite Kristin Hannah book so far.
When I Dream
awesome book – Carolyn O’May – MA
I bought this book for a friend because I enjoyed it so much. She loved it! I highly recommend it. Enjoy!
A Special Story – Marilyn – Conn.
I loved this book. It was so moving at the end I could feel the tears streaming down my cheeks. I always wanted to read on because I couldn’t figure out how everything would tie together. I have recommended this book to many because I truly feel it is a teriffic read!!!!!!!!!!!!!
An interesting story, but you will have to suspend disbelief … a lot … – Becki Robins – Grass Valley, CA
I liked this book at first but my opinion of it rapidly declined as the improbabilities started piling up. The characters–even the purportedly intellectual Julia–don’t really seem real. They behave irrationally at times and they seem to miss a lot of things that are obvious to the reader. The Alice character in particular seems like pure fabrication (she is, of course, but it was really hard for me to even pretend like she was real).
It’s mostly little things that bothered me, but there were enough of them to really detract from the overall appeal of this story. Some examples: It takes forever for it to dawn on anyone what was made painfully obvious in the early pages–that Alice is not just a little girl who “wandered off during a camping trip.” At one point the characters lament that they might have to turn the girl over to parents who have hurt her, which is ridiculous because I’m sure no court in the world would blindly turn over a child who’d been so obviously abused without some kind of evidence that the parents weren’t the abusers. And then there’s all that nonsense about Alice’s ability to communicate with animals–give me a break. There are also inconsistencies–we are told that the girl only understands a few words, but then we are told that she’d been warned in quite explicit terms about how there are bad people out in the world who might want to harm her, something she supposedly understood quite well. And maybe I don’t know how to treat starvation, but I’m pretty sure if you give a starving person waffles with sugary strawberry syrup and whipped cream, or greasy hamburgers and French fries you might actually kill her. Also, babies aren’t born in the O.R. (which stands for “operating room”) except by c-section, and any town big enough to have a hospital probably has an obstetrician (the author has Jack-of-all-trades doctor Max delivering babies and working in the E.R., too). Finally, at one point the author mentions that six-year-old Alice has been wearing the same diaper for a couple of days because no one can get close enough to change it but doesn’t explain why a six year old girl wouldn’t just take it off herself after it was so saturated as to be uncomfortable, oh, and apparently the girl doesn’t poop despite all those burgers and whipped cream covered waffles.
The writing is sloppy in places too. I was especially annoyed by the author’s lazy way of showing the passage of time: “An hour later,” “30 minutes later,” “for the next two hours …” YAWN! That’s really bad writing and I don’t know if it’s because this author has written so many books that she’s stopped worrying about the quality of her work because she knows her name will sell them–or if she’s just that bad at writing a transition. And at one point I asked myself whether or not I could continue reading about the “snot” flying out of the girl’s nose, which happened at least three times. Yuck.
Finally, I really questioned the author’s understanding of psychology, which it seems to me she would have needed to really effectively conquer this subject. It doesn’t seem plausible to me, for example, that a psychiatrist would attempt to treat an obviously traumatized child who screams in abject terror at the sight of a dreamcatcher by bringing her a bunch of dreamcatchers to further traumatize her. I don’t know, maybe that’s how psychiatrists do things, but it didn’t seem real to me.
The book did improve towards the end, when at last the story started to gain speed and actually became somewhat compelling. It was enough to make me up my rating from two stars to three, but it was very slow in getting there. Sadly, the ending was right back to improbable though it was easier to swallow because the characters had finally started to seem three dimensional.
In looking at the many other reviews, I realize I’m in a very small minority in my criticisms of this book, so maybe I’m just being overly picky or maybe I’m just flat wrong about some of my assumptions. But this story just didn’t sit right with me, and I’m afraid I can’t recommend it over the many other excellent novels out there.
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