This full-cast recording is the perfect production for Alice Hoffman’s linked stories of life on a two-hundred-year-old Cape Cod farm. The stories farthest removed from us in time are the most magical in genre, though in almost all, blood red pears, red shoes, and/or a white blackbird make an appearance. Hoffman leans heavily on repetition of these tropes and on certain emotionally freighted words like joy and sorrow; how effective you find this will depend more on your taste for magical realism than on the performances here, all but one of which are excellent. Just one voice in the series overemphasizes the already plenty emphatic mystical/magical tone. Hoffman fans should be delighted.—AudioFile Magazine