The Marriage of Opposites
Alice Hoffman
“A luminous, Marquez-esque tale” (O, The Oprah Magazine) from the New York Times bestselling author of The Museum of Extraordinary Things: a forbidden love story set on a tropical island about the extraordinary woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro—the Father of Impressionism.
Growing up on idyllic St. Thomas in the early 1800s, Rachel dreams of life in faraway Paris. Rachel’s mother, a pillar of their small refugee community of Jews who escaped the Inquisition, has never forgiven her daughter for being a difficult girl who refuses to live by the rules. Growing up, Rachel’s salvation is their maid Adelle’s belief in her strengths, and her deep, life-long friendship with Jestine, Adelle’s daughter. But Rachel’s life is not her own. She is married off to a widower with three children to save her father’s business. When her older husband dies suddenly and his handsome, much younger nephew, Frédérick, arrives from France to settle the estate, Rachel seizes her own life story, beginning a defiant, passionate love affair that sparks a scandal that affects all of her family, including her favorite son, who will become one of the greatest artists of France.
The Marriage of Opposites showcases the beloved, bestselling Alice Hoffman at the height of her considerable powers. “Her lush, seductive prose, and heart-pounding subject…make this latest skinny-dip in enchanted realism…the Platonic ideal of the beach read” (Slate.com). Once forgotten to history, the marriage of Rachel and Frédérick “will only renew your commitment to Hoffman’s astonishing storytelling” (USA Today).
“A work of art.” —Dallas Morning News
About the Author
Alice Hoffman is the bestselling author of more than thirty works of fiction for adults, young adults, and children, including Practical Magic, The Dovekeepers, and The Marriage of Opposites. Born in New York City in 1952 and raised on Long Island, she is known for blending realism with magic, and in much of her work that sensibility is entwined with Jewish history, memory, and moral questions.
Her most direct engagement with Jewish history comes in a cluster of historical novels. The Dovekeepers (2011) reimagines the siege of Masada in 70 CE through four women who take refuge on the mountain, centering female voices in an episode usually told through male heroism. The Marriage of Opposites (2015) tells the story of Rachel Pissarro, the mother of the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, growing up in the Sephardic Jewish community of St. Thomas. The World That We Knew (2019) follows a young girl in Berlin and the people who protect her during the Holocaust, drawing on Jewish folklore, including the legend of the golem, to explore survival, loss, and resistance. The Museum of Extraordinary Things (2014) brings Jewish immigrant life in early twentieth-century New York to the page, set against the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
Her young adult novel Incantation (2006) portrays a Converso family hiding their faith during the Spanish Inquisition, introducing younger readers to the history of crypto-Jews. Throughout, Hoffman returns to recurring concerns that resonate with Jewish tradition: the endurance of memory, the ethical weight of rescue and witness, the bonds of family and community, the pain of exile and displacement, and the persistence of hope in the face of persecution. Her storytelling often echoes the oral tradition of folktale and midrash, treating the magical and the historical as companions rather than opposites.
Hoffman lives in Boston and Florida. Her novels have been translated into more than twenty languages.