Book Reviews
For readers, sniffing out the parallels between the stories slightly obscures one of the pleasures of reverse narrative—its sense of inexorability, of every action tending toward a certain conclusion. Deftly and quietly, Hoffman tucks in the plot strand that ties together her tragic love stories; but following its thread isn't what keeps readers turning the pages. That honor goes to the young Frieda of the novel's middle section, in part because her brave, direct character is more appealing than insecure Maddy and sad, silent Lucy, and in part because she moves in a time and place many of us might have liked to witness—one where fans screamed to have a glimpse of John Lennon and an air of exotic possibility touched even young hotel maids, who, in their thick eyeliner and minidresses, "looked like a horde of Cleopatras when they went out en masse."
Polly Morrice - New York Times
Is there an American novelist who understands the complicated and mulitfacted nature of love in all its manifestations — romantic, familial, platonic — better than Alice Hoffman?... Some critics have minimized the complexity of Hoffman’s work by refering to her as a romance writer. Well, Hoffman is a romance writer, but then so were Flaubert, Proust, the Bronte sisters, and Jane Austen. The Third Angel is indeed a romance, but one of intricacy and pathos, with characters beautifully, believably and empathetically drawn....The Third Angel represents yet another strong, visceral and deeply, darkly moving tale of love and heatbreak, tragedy and redemption from a writer whose keen ear for the measure struck by the beat of the human heart is unparalleled. The Third Angel is an intense, provocative and throughly affecting novel.
Chicago Tribune
Hoffman’s luminous language bounces us into accepting not only coincident but also its consequences.
Boston Globe
Like Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Hoffman’s tale weaves the stories of women at key moments in their lives with revelations both stunning and inevitable.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
With a graceful nod to the power of redemption, Alice Hoffman reminds readers we are all hurt and broken, stumbling through life and fumbling for love, but sometimes we can still find out way to where we want to go.
Charlotte Observer
Headstrong women, reckless love affairs and a liberal dusting of the supernatural are the pleasurable trademarks of an Alice Hoffman novel.... Her passionate storytelling and intense characters make a deeply personal connetion that should bewitch old fans and new readers alike.
People
In this elegant and stunning novel, veteran heartstring-puller Hoffman (Here on Earth; Seventh Heaven) examines the lives of three women at different crossroads in their lives, tying their London-centered stories together in devastating retrospect. High powered New York attorney Maddy Heller arrives in 1999 London having had an affair with Paul, her sister Allie's fiancé,; she must now cope with the impending marriage, and with Paul's terminal illness-which echoes the girls' mother's cancer during their childhood. Hoffman then shifts to heady 1966 London and to Frieda Lewis, Paul's future mother, who falls for a doomed up-and-coming songwriter knowing he will break her heart. The narrative then shifts further back, to 1952 and to Maddy and Allie's future mother, Lucy Green. A bookish 12-year-old wise beyond her years, Lucy sails with her father and stepmother from New York to London for a wedding. There, she becomes an innocent catalyst to a devastating event involving a love triangle. Hoffman interweaves the three stories, gazing unerringly into forces that cause some people to self-destruct ("There was no such thing as too much for a girl who thought she was second best") and others to find inner strength to last a lifetime.
Publishers Weekly
(Audio version.) In a haunted London hotel, the lives of three women intersect across time. A jealous sister cheats with her brother-in-law to-be, a chambermaid beguiles a rock star by composing an original lyric, and a 12-year-old girl is enlisted as go-between for doomed lovers. In each vignette's time warp, the hotel ghost conducts his nightly seventh floor rampage. Hoffman's unsettling and compelling 20th novel weaves the sadness and loss of ordinary people coping in extraordinary ways into tensile strength. The book and audio share the same haunting cover art depicting the fragile third angel who anonymously walks among us to give us aid. Reader Nancy Travis is able to unravel the threads of interlocking plot pieces without drawing the spotlight, allowing the story to outshine the voice reading it. Essential for fiction collections.
Judith Robinson - Library Journal
One of her best...an exceptionally well-structured, beguiling, and affecting triptych of catastrophic love stories.... Not only is Hoffman spellbinding in this incandescent fusion of dark romance and penetrating psychic insight, she also opens diverse and compelling worlds, dramatizes the shocks and revelations that forge the self, and reveals the necessity and toll of empathy and kindness. Hoffman has transcended her own genre.
Booklist
A ghost in a down-at-the-heels London hotel ties together three tragic romances in Hoffman's latest (Skylight Confessions, 2007, etc.). Though all three episodes are strongly conceived with complex characters, the connecting material includes carelessly repetitive plot devices (warring sisters, cancer-stricken mothers), highly improbable links among the major figures and a seriously overused blue heron. The "third angel" metaphor is also heavy-handed, but at least has a tangible connection to the plot. In addition to the Angel of Life and the Angel of Death, Dr. Lewis tells his daughter Frieda, there's a Third Angel, "who walked among us, who sometimes lay sick in bed, begging for human compassion." Frieda passes along this insight to Allie, who marries Frieda's dying son Paul during the summer of 1999 in the novel's first section. Though Allie's furiously jealous younger sister Maddy does everything she can to destroy the wedding-including sleeping with Paul, who's trying to convince his fiancee that he doesn't deserve her-nothing can kill the love that blossoms in Allie as Paul's illness grows mortal. Section two moves back to 1966, when 19-year-old Frieda has fled her father's plans for her to become a doctor and gone to work as a maid at the Lion Park Hotel. Frieda falls in love with Jamie, the junkie rock star in Room 708, and writes him two songs: "The Third Angel" and "The Ghost of Michael Macklin." The latter is about the specter introduced in the book's opening pages, when Maddy hears shouting in Room 707 and learns that something terrible happened there in 1952. In fact, it was Maddy and Allie's mother, then 12 years old, who witnessed the incident that created the ghost, an outgrowth of yet another doomed wedding. The particulars are recounted in the closing section, which features another cluster of full-bodied characters. By now, however, the piling up of disasters and coincidences has become ridiculous. Some moving material about love and loss, swamped by authorial excess.
Kirkus Reviews