Novel paints portrait of artist's mother

Rachel Pomié is a headstrong girl living in a Jewish enclave of the island of St. Thomas in the early 19th century. She longs to move to France, which her grandparents fled when Jews were jailed and murdered. But Rachel’s fate is determined when she is married off as a teen to Isaac, a much older widower with three children in a match designed to salvage her father’s rum and molasses business.

A good wife and mother to Isaac’s children, Rachel, at 29, finds herself a widow with six children when her husband’s distant cousin, Frédéric, arrives from France to take over the business. He is 22, handsome and immediately smitten with Rachel, as is she with him, but the rules of the synagogue forbid Rachel from marrying her husband’s cousin.

In The Marriage of Opposites, novelist Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic) creates a world of forbidden love, lush beauty, secrets and mothers repeating the sins of their own mothers. Rachel, who chafes at her mother’s rules and judgments, grows up to be just as controlling of her beloved son, Camille. She thwarts his desire to paint until she realizes she can no more deny his passion than she could deny her love for Frédéric. Camille is the early Impressionist Camille Pissarro.

Hoffman inhabits the world of St. Thomas with such sensual detail that you can practically smell the frangipani and hear the hummingbirds. The mystical rules this island, where crows are a harbinger of death, pelicans embody the spirits of loved ones, and “haint blue” is a shade that wards off evil.

Rachel is as compelling as she is confounding. Can’t she see she is doing to her own children what her mother did to her? Like Rachel and her beloved friend Jestine, Camille falls in love with an “inappropriate” person. Jestine, the daughter of the family maid, loves Rachel’s cousin, Aaron. Even on an island as small as St. Thomas, many secrets are kept, maybe a few too many for believability.

Marriage is as lush and evocative as one of Pissarro’s paintings, a story of love, faith, race, tolerance and forgiveness. For readers who would go anywhere Hoffman will take you, this Marriage will only renew your commitment to her astonishing storytelling.

The Marriage of Opposites

By Alice Hoffman

Simon & Schuster, 365 pp.

3.5 stars out of 4