TL;DR: Full of flowers, prose, and family emotion, The Probable Future by Alice Hoffman is magical and heartfelt if a little too long.
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Sparrow women each are given gifts on their thirteenth birthday. For Elinor, she can tell when someone lies. For Jenny, her daughter, she can see people’s dreams. And for Stella, Jenny’s daughter, she can see people’s futures. But their gifts are a backdrop to the real story about the women, the men who loved them and whom they love(d), and the distance that grows between mothers and daughters.
This book took me by surprise. Having read the reviews, I expected to not like most of the characters or find them shallow. That was not the case. While the prose could be overwhelming, the journey the women go on resonated with me and my experience. Maybe that’s why it didn’t seem shallow to me. Or maybe that touch of magic, which was woven throughout the story, was what drew me in. Either way, I felt the end of the book (no spoilers!) more than I expected. For all those reasons and more, I gave this book 4 stars.
The Plot
Jenny Sparrow runs away at seventeen, giving up her future and education, for the love of a bad boy named Will Avery. Her home life was cold and her mother distant since Jenny’s dad died in a car crash. Elinor Sparrow, Jenny’s mom, couldn’t seem to bridge the emotional gap created after Saul died, nor did she seem to want to.
Jenny gives birth to a daughter, Stella, and her focus changes. She does everything she can to make Stella safe, to not make the same mistake her own mother made, but all that does is push Stella away. When Stella is thirteen, her family magical gift appears: she can see people’s futures. When she tells her father about one woman’s future, it sets off the events that drive Stella, and eventually Jenny, back home to Elinor’s house.
The women are now faced with their past mistakes, tragic events, the Sparrow family legacy, love, change, and forgiveness. Can they see their way back to each other before it’s too late?
What I liked & liked less
I liked this story. It’s much different from the other books I read for the Fantasy Bingo 2022 challenge. Less fantasy and more magic realism. I think I recall reading Alice Hoffman’s other book, Practical Magic, but I don’t remember it (maybe because I liked the movie more). With all that said, however, I enjoyed this book and read it quickly.
The magic is present, and yet not. It’s woven through the story in a way to make it important but doesn’t impact the personalities of the characters. Yes, they make decisions based on it, but they aren’t defined by their gifts. I loved the use of rain, the different kinds of rain, the smells and the richness of the description of the garden, the house, even the characters. I especially envy Hoffman’s easy use of smell; it’s a hard sense to write about.
However, there were places where the prose was too much, where it bogged down the story and where a good edit would have been good. I counted four eBook pages discussing roses at one point in the story and that’s just four pages too much for me. But some people love that kind prose, so it’s definitely a me thing and I only noticed it when I skipped ahead a few times.
Some reviews I read didn’t like the characters, especially Stella, or found them banal or two dimensional. I didn’t find that to be the case. In fact, I recognized myself in the thirteen-year-old who would say anything to cause pain to the mother who raised her. Maybe that’s why I didn’t hate her. Or maybe I saw depth in the story where they did not. Either way, I liked all the characters, except for the killer.
The characters had flaws, they had growth, they had lessons to learn. Stella grew less than the others, but then she’s a teenager and so much of her life is yet to come. I also found the secondary characters to be well-rounded and given enough of a stake in the story to feel real. I would’ve liked Jenny’s love story to be more present than it was. Stella’s story was given more discussion than her mother’s, although we have a lot of the history between Jenny and Will, Stella’s dad.
I didn’t like the killer character or the murder. It felt too contrived, too convenient. He just seemed like an afterthought, a way to move the plot forward, and to make things happen that needed to happen. Luckily, he’s only in it for a moment or two and then he’s gone. The author tried to include some red herrings in the book, but they weren’t strong enough or weren’t in the right place for me to feel them in a way I would’ve liked.
To Sum Up (Too Late!)
If you like a book about family, the pain they cause each other, and the odd ways you find your way back to them, you’ll like this book. The descriptive prose and the presences of the setting created a magical environment for the events of the book. The characters were flawed, a bit broken, but also found ways to grow, which made the story interesting. At its heart, The Probable Future is less about magic and more about the women who were given it even when they didn’t want it. The twists and turns were okay, but some were more forced than they needed to be. For all that and more, I gave this book 4 stars.
About the Author
Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including The World That We Knew; The Marriage of Opposites; The Red Garden; The Museum of Extraordinary Things; The Dovekeepers; Here on Earth, an Oprah’s Book Club selection; and the Practical Magic series, including Practical
Magic; Magic Lessons; The Rules of Magic, a selection of Reese’s Book Club; and The Book of Magic. She lives near Boston.
If you wish to purchase this book, pick your vendor of choice, or just cave to the man and get it from Amazon.
This fills in the Family Matters square on my Fantasy Bingo 2022 card.