Product Description

The Night of the Wolf. On the Avenue in the bleak area where New York City blends into suburbia, the Orphans, their fast Fords and their Chevys 'coated by ice and leather and white dust', prepare to engage in deadly, intricately structured games of combat. It is a world of grotesque, horrifying violence, fear, bravado and drugs, redeemed in the minds of its inhabitants by codes of honour, by chivalrous intentions and by the purity of their struggle for power, dominance, territory. This is the setting of Alice Hoffman's unsparing and unsentimental novel. Her heroine, 17 years old, quick witted yet vulnerable, falls helplessly in love with McKay, the Orphan's 22 year old president and their doomed love story is told in desperate counterpoint to the punk lyrical flippancies of throbbing car radios and jukes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #715092 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

The New York Times
'A remarkably envisioned novel, almost mythic in its cadences, hypnotic…the imagining is true, the writing lovely’

Publishers Weekly
‘Highly original’

Baltimore Sun
Showing the magic that lies below the surface of everyday life is just what we hope for in a satisfying novel...

Customer Reviews

Not Hoffman's best
As a great fan of Alice Hoffman I was looking forward to this book but I found it rather lifeless and depressing. While her trademark descriptive passages are there her characterisation is not. The 'heroine', whose name we never learn, is unlikeable and embarrasses herself by her obsession with McKay, the leader of one of the gangs. She lets him get away with treating her appallingly in her quest to be one of the gang's "Property" and I don't know if we're meant to admire her, but I wound up wanting to smack her. The rest of the characters, with perhaps the exception of the man who works behind the bar at the cafe, are two-dimensional and seem almost laughable in their cliched roles.

Don't read this as your first Alice Hoffman - see how she went on to greater things with "Seventh Heaven" or "At Risk"!

Property of
I am a major Alice Hoffman fan- she is one of the few writers I buy in hardback and cannot wait to open the pages.'Property of' was hugely disappointing, it lacked the beauty of prose and sense of magic that are her trademark. I found it rather dark and depressing. Read ALL the other Alice Hoffman books, but leave this one on the shelf!

A dark debut
Having read a number of Alice Hoffman's other novels I was surprised at the darkness of her debut, and of its subject matter, the gangs and drug dealers on the streets. I enjoyed it nevertheless, and though it's certainly not her best novel it's perfectly readable, and you don't have to like or approve of the characters to understand them or appreciate the story. It ends on a hopeful note, but there is a lot of darkness and misery along the way. The theme of a woman being drawn to an unsuitable or unlikely man has been done a number of times by Alice Hoffman, and this is perhaps the prototype. She did it better in subsequent novels, but Property Of is still worth a read.