Book Review - Alice Hoffman's The Book of Magic
The Book of Magic by Alice Hoffman
Published by: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: October 5th, 2021
Format: Hardcover, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
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Jet is in the library when she hears the death watch beetle. She will die in seven days. She doesn't fight it. She doesn't rail against her fate. She decides to spend the last week of her life celebrating how wonderful it was. Now that her time is short she can tell the man she's been in love with from the day he saved her life that it is indeed love. The curse can't get them now. She gathers all those she loves to make sure they know she loved them. If only she could tell her brother Vincent how much she loves and misses him. But her message will arrive too late. Because some things just happen too late. On the last night of her life, in the library where Jet learned of her impending death she sees something she's never noticed before. The bricks under the display of Maria Owens's journals have different mortar. Behind them she finds the Book of the Raven. This grimoire, written by Shakespeare's "Dark Lady," turned Maria's daughter Faith down the left hand path. But it holds the key to breaking the curse the Owens family has lived under. To break the curse the witch must be willing to give up everything. Jet has nothing left to give. She leaves clues for her sister Franny to find the book if she must and dies knowing her life was well lived. At the funeral Sally's girls, Kylie and Antonia, learn of the curse for the first time from a distant relative. Sally has kept them ignorant of magic and if they were ever to fall in love, well, they'd tell her right? And then she'd put a stop to it. After all Antonia is levelheaded, she's in medical school and having a baby with her gay best friend and his partner and she doesn't believe in love. Kylie though has a secret. She's been desperately in love with her best friend Gideon. And she's a romantic. The one thing she takes from Jet's room is a book of Emily Dickinson's poems. Inside the book is a note for Franny about the grimoire. Which Kylie finds the day she proclaims her love for Gideon and he ends up in a coma. She returns to the house on Magnolia Street and retrieves the Book of the Raven from the library. She cuts off all contact with her family and flies to the other Essex County in England determined to break this curse once and for all. Sally, being to blame for not telling her children their heritage, knows it's her responsibility to fix this, but her own magic has been denied so long they need a finder. They need Vincent. Sally, Gillian, and Franny set off for France and collect Vincent before heading to England. But they need reinforcements, and Ian Wright has walked the thin line between right and left handed magic his whole life. And it seems that destiny has brought him and Sally together as he grew up where Maria Owens came from. With lives and love on the line, will this unlikely family grouping be able to finally break the curse or will Kylie and companionship be lost to them forever?
As I write this review Practical Magic 2, which is based on this book, has just been released, actually on VOD because I'm sometimes slow getting to writing reviews. I was determined to read no spoilers for the film, but I was equally determined to finish this book before watching said film. And, yeah me, I have succeeded. Though I'm also equally baffled as to how they could turn this book into a vehicle starring Sandra Bullock and Nichole Kidman because the journey their characters take literally takes a back seat on a train racketing through Essex to the story of the greats and Sally's children. Also, they're twenty years too old, but that's only if it's a direct adaptation and goddess knows the first movie in no way resembles the first book. Of the books in this tetralogy I fell most in love with The Rules of Magic, which is about Franny, Jet, and Vincent growing up in New York City in the fifties and sixties. The Book of Magic actually feels like a direct sequel. This is more about those three siblings and what they sacrificed and how they lived their lives than anything to do with Sally and Gillian. And that is why I loved this book. It was the perfect ending to the series. From the time Jet heard the death watch beetle until her last moments with her sister I was a complete wreck. The joy they had for life, the way they worked around what life, or more particularly, what Maria Owens, threw at them was so affirming. Life is magic and I think a lot of us need to be reminded of that every once in a while. Plus, seeing as this book relies on the backstory presented in the painfully bad Magic Lessons, I felt like I was finally being given a reward for slogging through its four-hundred pages. Vindication is mine! But more importunately, I loved how this book just brought everything full circle. This felt like a satisfying conclusion and in this day and age that is a rare thing. Oh, and the curse gets broken, so yeah! Though what I find interesting and frustrating about Alice Hoffman is that she doesn't really seem to have any kind of bible for her series and therefore events and meanings can shift. I actually can't remember if the curse is even explicitly named in the first book. So far left hand magic has always been bad magic. Here she expands on the concept of what left is in an almost confusing manner. Left has always been associated with the sinister. Sinister literally means "on the left side." Why do you think nuns forced left-handed children to write with their right? Here Alice Hoffman is using the left more colloquially, so that anytime someone does something wrong they were headed down the left hand path. But someone can be a criminal and not magical so this just annoyed me. I mean, not everyone is Ian who's been both. But I'm just being nitpicky. She couldn't have seen where this series was going when it started in the mid-nineties. That is unless she secretly has the sight! Oh, she's a witch! That's how she knows so much. Just a slightly forgetful witch.
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