Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

As this novel’s famous opening paragraph goes,

"For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town. If a damp spring arrived, if cows in the pasture gave milk that was runny with blood, if a colt died of colic or a baby was born with a red mark stamped onto his check, everyone believed that fate must have been twisted, at least a little, by those women over on Magnolia Street. It didn’t matter what the problem was –lightening, or locusts, or a death by drowning. It didn’t matter if the situation could be explained by logic, or science, or plain bad luck. As soon as there was a hint of trouble or the slightest misfortune, people began pointing their fingers and placing blame."

Sally and Gillian Owens are very young when they go live with their aunts on the house on Magnolia Street after their parents die. Very soon, everyone in the small Massachusetts town fears them and casts them aside, just like they’ve done with every other Owens woman before them. Sally and Gillian grow up, and they become as different as they are close. Impetuous Gillian leaves town when she turns eighteen and vows never to cone back. Sally stays with the aunts, but after her attempt to lead a normal life ends in tragedy, she too leaves Magnolia Street to move to New York, where she tries to start a new life with her daughters Antonia and Kylie.

There were many things I loved about Practical Magic. I loved Alice Hoffman’s writing. I loved the fairy tale atmosphere, and the way she blurs the line between fantasy and reality. I loved the way the relationships between the Owens women were portrayed. Despite all their differences, Sally and Gillian remain close, and the fact that they truly care about each other always shows.

Then there’s Antonia and Kyle’s affection for the Aunts, and the fact that, very interestingly, we only learn their names towards the end of the book. I liked how we got to see them under a different light when they go to New York to help Sally and Gillian. We are finally given an idea of what it must have been like for them to wake up with the telephone ringing one night and be told they were going to have to have to raise two little girls. At that point in the story they cease to be two examples of the strange-old-lady-who-just-might-be-a-witch stereotype to become two real people with distinct personalities.

Unfortunately, there were also a few things about this novel that I didn’t really like. First of all, there was a small thing that bugged me: the story is told in the present tense, and for some reason this distracted me. This is something Trish had mentioned about Alice Hoffman before, if I’m not mistaken, but I hadn’t noticed it in her other books. This time I did, and even though I’d get used to it after a while, if I put the book aside for a while it would bug me again once I picked it back up.

Secondly, and more importantly, there are quite a few love stories in Practical Magic, and for the most part they struck me as being on the superficial side. They were a little too based on the concepts like fate and love at first sight for my taste. I prefer love stories in which people actually get to know each other and make a conscious choice to be together, rather than being fated to do so. And I realize that love at first sight is common enough in fairy tales, but this wasn’t enough of a fairy tale for me to just shrug it off. And anyway, my favourite fairy tale novels tend to be exactly the ones that subvert that stereotype.

There was actually a marked contrast between the way romantic relationships are portrayed in this novel and the solid ties between women in the Owens family. I realize that this was probably part of what Hoffman was going for, but I wonder if we really need that contrast, because it’s not like the two things are mutually exclusive.

If you were to ask me if Practical Magic is worth reading, my answer would still be a definitive yes. But this is actually my least favourite of the Alice Hoffman novels that I’ve read so far. It’s well written, charming and very engaging, but unlike The Ice Queen and Green Angel, it didn’t wow me. If this had been my first Hoffman book, I probably wouldn’t have found myself thinking that she could very well become a favourite author of mine. As it is, I still think she could, provided that the rest of her books are more along the lines of The Ice Queen than of Practical Magic.

Other Blog Reviews:
Fuzzy Cricket
Musings of a Bookish Kitten
The Bookworm
Just One More Chapter
Mari Reads
Everyday Reads
Life and Times of a 'New' New Yorker

(Let me know if I missed yours.)