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Title: Thought provoking and engrossing
Review: This is not the first Hoffman novel I've read; I always enjoy her. Blue Diary keeps you reading and I like that. Her prose is poetic and her characters well drawn. I'm not going to recite the plot since that's been done in numerous reviews before mine. I just want to add that I think the strength of the novel is that by looking primarily at how other people see Ethan, Hoffman is able to perform the magic of slightly tilting our view, so that the man we saw in Chapter one is not the man we come to know at the end of the novel. The author correctly keeps us out of Ethan's POV most of the time. This is not really his story. He doesn't really change and that is the real surprise that Hoffman has for us. This is the story of the ripples from something he did 15 years ago and how these ripples affect so many people in his world today. I think Jorie made the right choice in the end.
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