SOURCE: “‘To Build Is to Dwell’: The Beautiful, Strange Architectures of Alice Hoffman's Novels,” in Hollins Critic, Vol. XXXIII, No. 5, December, 1996, pp. 1-15.

In the following essay, Davidson argues that the magic realism in Alice Hoffman's novels is characterized by Romantic individualism.

When I was a child and hours inched with gargantuan infinitude beyond me, past me, I can remember my near-sensual craving, the detail-mongering distilled into a ravenousness, the morning a crow flapped down into my driveway. In that immaculate environment, my mother'd set me out to play: here were no grease marks, oil spots, tire streaks, only the sunstruck expanse of white stretching beyond my hands. Suddenly, he was there, ebony as a night of imploded stars, his wings wind-ruffled, his beak sharp as a wound; he was there, eyeing me then strutting across our driveway with the cool impunity any nightmare from the subconscious, materialized...