Practical Magic

The first thing that has to be said is that this book has very little to do with the movie with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock. Really, the only thing in common between the two are the characters names.

With that aside, I think that Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic was fairly good. Practical Magic is the story of Sally and Gillian Owens, two sisters who were orphaned very young and subsequently were raised by their aunts who never imposed any rules on them. Their childhood was also strongly effected by the legends that the Owens women were and are witches, and that their aunts often meddled in the love lives of the people in their small Massachusetts town. This singular childhood had very different effects on the two girls and finally, a crisis brings the two sisters together.

This book wasn't fabulous and I wanted more magic (both in the sense of the storytelling and in the sense of a family of witches) but Hoffman portrayed the relationships between sisters, different as night and day but bound by blood and experience, very well. One problem I had with the book was the verb tenses used by Hoffman: everything past a certain point is in the present tense. Perhaps it is because I am not used to a style of writing that uses the present tense so heavily but it got on my nerves.

I might try reading more of Hoffman's work but I wasn't thrilled. As I said, there were some good elements, including the relationships between the Owens women, but there wasn't enough for me to fall in love with it.

Rating: 3.0