“Riley’s debut novel fuses a lyrical, tender love story with a sophisticated depiction of a supernatural sentient being… [Riley] succeeds both in getting the reader to suspend disbelief and fashioning a compelling story.” —Publishers Weekly
About The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope The story of Adam Hope begins as WWII ends. Evelyn Roe finds what she thinks is a badly injured soldier on her family’s farm in rural North Carolina and literally unearths him. But she soon discovers he is a very unique stranger, not a man, and not one of us, vastly different from Evelyn, while also capable of being very much like her.
The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope is about being the other, about loving others, and accepting what we cannot understand. For me, the heart of this book is the moment we look at someone we love and have known for a long time—a friend, a parent, lover, spouse or child—and think “Who are you?” The question can be one of amazement and delight or a dark panic. How do we love someone we cannot understand or fully know? And what do we do when life gives us something extraordinary and unbelievable?
The Carolina red-clay dirt and the freshwater springs of north central Florida play a major role in this story. Nature is one of its central characters. There are also lots of horses, a good bit of music, some sex, several births, and one acid trip. Adam’s story is also about story-telling. We all have a story and each of our stories is exquisitely individual. But they are not living stories unless we tell them to others. Stories live only in the presence of others. Stories are born and thrive only in that space between teller and listener, between the writer and the dear reader.
Here’s what a few others have had to say about The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope
“The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope is strange and powerful, a hybrid work that’s part Alice Munro, part Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and entirely, marvelously, itself. In her debut novel, Rhonda Riley has written the most resonant and touching love story I’ve read in a very long time.”
—Lauren Groff, bestselling author of Arcadia, The Monsters of Templeton, Fates and Furies and Florida
“The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope is an incredible, otherworldly love story. Both whimsical and deeply satisfying, it’s a tale about the fluidity of love, the importance of family, and the meaning of home. Rhonda Riley gives us a new way of looking at the human heart-its boundaries as well as its boundlessness. Her debut reads with the urgency of a lifelong secret finally confessed.”
— Julianna Baggott, bestselling author of The Madam, Girl Talk, Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders, and the young adult sci-fi trilogy Pure, Fuse, and Burn.
“Rhonda Riley’s debut novel fuses a lyrical, tender love story with a sophisticated depiction of a supernatural sentient being… [Riley] succeeds both in getting the reader to suspend disbelief and fashioning a compelling story.”
—Publishers Weekly
For more reviews and some interviews click here
Me talking about The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope