Novel of the week: The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman

last updated 8 January 2015

(Scribner, $28)

“How little it takes to pluck us from our modern lives” and immerse us in an ancient world of omens and fervent religious faith, said Susan Salter Reynolds in Newsday. That’s where Alice Hoffman’s new 500-page novel takes readers, as she re-creates life in the city of Masada, a mountaintop fortress where 900 Jews would commit mass suicide when a Roman legion breached the walls in A.D. 74. Four women, including one witch and a warrior who disguises herself as a man, separately recount the lives that led them to the redoubt, and the novel becomes “one long darkening sky.” Not everything works, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Many of the births, trysts, and violent events described are “dramatic and engaging,” but the four biographies delay the grim climax far too long. Worse, all four women are champions of 21st-century liberal values. But what else can you expect? Hoffman “may be the most uneven writer in America.” This novel, at least, is at times “practically magic.”