jules's Reviews > Incantation

Alice Hoffman is an amazing author. She has the ability to write each novel like a poem. It feels like poetry, but with an incredible story to go along with it. But each book is so extremely sad, which is a hard emotion to write. Alice Hoffman's books are super great, and the emotions they can control is extraordinary.
Incantation, my second Hoffman book, is about a girl, Estrella, who is living in Spain in the 1500's. All her life, she has thought she was a Christian and thought she knew who she was. But as people in her town begin brutally murdering and punishing secret Jews, she finds out secrets about her family and herself that she never knew before. Her family is Jewish, and they have been practicing the religion, without Estrella even knowing that her religion is different.
To make things worse, Estrella falls in love with her best friend's cousin, Andres. The friend, Catalina, becomes extremely jealous, as she had planned to marry Andres. The two who had been best friends for their lives began to split apart and become enemies.
Catalina had been hiding behind a mask of jealousy her whole life, and she decided to get her revenge by turning in Estrella's family.
The sense of panic, love, and other emotions is so strong in this book. The way people were killed brought tears to my eyes and even made me see it like the characters were. As they say in the book "Remember the story she is about to tell you". True words, indeed, though this book is probably difficult to forget, anyway.