Jackie can't run and skate and throw as well as the other children, but his clumsiness eventually saves the villagers from a winter that would not end.
The fireflies return annually, bringing spring with them, but this year, they don't show up; winter lingers and no one knows why. In the meantime, Jackie Healy falls, breaks things, trips, and believes that his parents would prefer "the sort of boy who could skate in a perfect circle and climb trees without falling and pitch a ball without breaking windows." In shame, he leaves his village, becoming lost in the Yellow Mountains. His clumsiness results in unwitting, but effective, acts of heroism, for he releases the fireflies and brings back spring. McLoughlin illuminates the pages with sparkling stars, blinking fireflies, and glowing globes of lantern light against blue, snowy nights and black sky borders, printed on glossy stock. The message isn't very subtle, the telling is long and windy, but there are those who will find comfort in these pages.
After high school, Hoffman went to work for the Doubleday factory in Garden City. But the eight-hour, supervised workday was not for her, and she quit before lunch on her first day! She enrolled in night school at Adelphi University, graduating in 1971 with a degree in English. She went on to attend Stanford University's Creative Writing Center on a Mirrellees Fellowship. Her mentor at Stanford, the great teacher and novelist Albert Guerard, helped to get her first story published in the literary magazine Fiction. The story attracted the attention of legendary editor Ted Solotaroff, who asked if she had written any longer fiction. She hadn't -- but immediately set to work. In 1977, when Hoffman was 25, her first novel, Property Of, was published to great fanfare.
Since that remarkable debut, Hoffman has carved herself a unique niche in American fiction. A favorite with teens as well as adults, she renders life's deepest mysteries immediately understandable in stories suffused with magic realism and a dreamy, fairy-tale sensibility. (In a 1994 article for The New York Times, interviewer Ruth Reichl described the magic in Hoffman's books as a casual, regular occurrence -- "...so offhand that even the most skeptical reader can accept it.") Her characters' lives are transformed by uncontrollable forces -- love and loss, sorrow and bliss, danger and death.
Hoffman's 1997 novel Here on Earth was selected as an Oprah Book Club pick, but even without Winfrey's powerful endorsement, her books have become huge bestsellers -- including three that have been adapted for the movies: Practical Magic (1995), The River King (2000), and her YA fable Aquamarine (2001).
Hoffman is a breast cancer survivor; and like many people who consider themselves blessed with luck, she believes strongly in giving back. For this reason, she donated her advance from her 1999 short story collection Local Girls to help create the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA.
Overview
Jackie can't run and skate and throw as well as the other children, but his clumsiness eventually saves the villagers from a winter that would not end.