Book Review - Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
Published by: Berkley
Publication Date: July 1st, 1995
Format: Kindle, 290 Pages
Rating: ★★
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Sally and Gillian Owens's upbringing has been far from normal. Orphaned at a young age they moved to Massachusetts to live with their aunts. Their house on Magnolia Street is where the desperate women of the town came to get what they most desire. Love can be bought, but at what cost? Sally is determined to have a normal life and looks for any sign that her aunts are nothing but charlatans. Sadly, she sees no such evidence and the insults hurled at her and Gillian are, in Sally's mind, nothing but the cruel truth. As time passes the insults of the other children turn to intrigue. Gillian starts turning heads. But they have been warned by their aunts. Love isn't in the cards if you are an Owens. Two young boys they dearly cared for were struck by lightning on the town green and it has become part of the allure to the womenfolk at their door. Yet love will find a way. Gillian elopes and is already done with her first marriage when she's barely out of high school. And then Sally falls. Hard. Michael and her and their two daughters, Kylie and Antonia, live with the aunts on Magnolia Street. The town embraces them. Everything is perfect until some kids are out joyriding and hit and kill Michael. Sally does not speak for a year. Her only connection to the world is a weekly phone call with her sister. After the year is up Sally packs up her daughters and moves out. For eleven years she did the right thing. For eleven years her daughters were raised in a stable home environment with only one week of excess in August with the aunts in Massachusetts. And then Gillian returns. She hasn't been east of the Mississippi since she first crossed it all those years ago. She's in trouble. Big trouble. She's brought Jimmy. Jimmy is dead. He was abusive and dangerous and she was just trying to give herself a little bit of a break and, well, she killed him with poison. She really didn't mean it to be fatal. But here she is, east of the Mississippi and asking her sister for help. They bury him under the lilac. Lilacs aren't supposed to bloom in July, but these are. And that's not the only unnatural occurrence. As Gillian inserts herself into her sister's life she creates an enemy in Kylie and an ally in Antonia. Kylie is further enraged by Gillian's courtship of her favorite teacher, Ben Frye. As the girls start to turn into young women and Sally and Gillian cope with their past one thing is certain, time might be running out. Because a man like Jimmy doesn't disappear without someone noticing. And that someone could be dangerous to Sally and her heart. Luckily whenever things get too bad at least you can call in the aunts. They are the best reinforcements anyone can ask for.
Practical Magic is a cultural phenomenon. The movie that is. I can't count the number of times that I have watched it. In college I took a set design class and one of my teacher's former students had worked on the film so he had oodles of pictures of the set to share with us. I remember sitting in that darkened classroom and dreaming of living in the Owens's house. Because, let's be honest, anyone who has ever watched this film wants that house. In fact one of my friends was devastated to learn that the house was a facade with the interiors on a sound stage elsewhere. She needed to believe that the house was out there and she could one day show up and move in. I pointed out that she could always build a replica but she insists it's not the same. This is how strong people feel about this movie. They are destroyed if the curtain is lifted on the mundane realities that went into making it. They want to believe in the magic. As did I. Though I would be totally fine with a replica for your information if anyone wanted to build me one. I love this movie so much that of course I wanted to read the book. But first I had to find the exact copy I was willing to read. I needed the tie-in edition with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman on the cover with witches silhouetted over the moon. Once I found it, I read it, and I hated it for not being the movie. I quickly sold that edition I had spent so much time to acquire and vowed never to look back. With the second movie coming out I decided to give the book a second chance. I was going to read it and try not to draw comparisons between it and the beloved film it became. I was going to let it stand on it's own. As you can probably guess, that was never going to work. I love the film too much. But I was able to go back in knowing how different it was and to try to judge it on it's own merits. So, how is the book on it's own? I hate all the characters. They're all unpleasant and miserable. What's more, the focus on Sally's teenage daughters makes the book too full of teenage angst. Teenage angst that even Gillian hasn't grown out of despite being a thirty something year old woman. Stop acting like a lovestruck teen! Grow up! Everything about you pisses me off. Oh, and your ex Jimmy? Alice Hoffman was channeling Anne Rice's Lasher big time. It was actually a bit disconcerting. Though the failing of this book is more in how it's told than what's told, so it's all on Alice Hoffman's writing. It's written in a weird leaping omniscient narration so you don't know who is being referred to. And as a reader of Terry Pratchett I'm used to books without chapters because life doesn't happen in chapters, but having four sections in an almost three hundred page book with no natural breaks is off-putting and at times grueling. The style is trying to be too lyrical and is just dripping with purple prose. Here's an idea, let the characters speak for themselves instead of describing everything in the tiniest detail while also confusing the heck out of your readers. So yeah, this book wasn't for me, but at least I can say I dislike it for itself instead of hating it for what it isn't.
