By Alice Hoffman
Ready by Marin Ireland
Listening length: 11 hours, 58 minutes
My review 4.5 out of 5 stars
Release date: October 10, 2017
Find your magic.
For the Owens family, love is a curse that began in 1620, when Maria Owens was charged with witchery for loving the wrong man.
Hundreds of years later, in New York City at the cusp of the sixties, when the whole world is about to change, Susanna Owens knows that her three children are dangerously unique. Difficult Franny, with skin as pale as milk and blood red hair, shy and beautiful Jet, who can read other people's thoughts, and charismatic Vincent, who began looking for trouble on the day he could walk.
From the start Susanna sets down rules for her children: No walking in the moonlight, no red shoes, no wearing black, no cats, no crows, no candles, no books about magic. And most importantly, never, ever, fall in love. But when her children visit their Aunt Isabelle, in the small Massachusetts town where the Owens family has been blamed for everything that has ever gone wrong, they uncover family secrets and begin to understand the truth of who they are. Yet, the children cannot escape love even if they try, just as they cannot escape the pains of the human heart. The two beautiful sisters will grow up to be the memorable aunts in Practical Magic, while Vincent, their beloved brother, will leave an unexpected legacy.
Alice Hoffman delivers "fairy-tale promise with real-life struggle" (The New York Times Book Review) in a story how the only remedy for being human is to be true to yourself. Thrilling and exquisite, real and fantastical, The Rules of Magic is "irresistible...the kind of book you race through, then pause at the last forty pages, savoring your final moments with the characters"
Hundreds of years later, in New York City at the cusp of the sixties, when the whole world is about to change, Susanna Owens knows that her three children are dangerously unique. Difficult Franny, with skin as pale as milk and blood red hair, shy and beautiful Jet, who can read other people's thoughts, and charismatic Vincent, who began looking for trouble on the day he could walk.
From the start Susanna sets down rules for her children: No walking in the moonlight, no red shoes, no wearing black, no cats, no crows, no candles, no books about magic. And most importantly, never, ever, fall in love. But when her children visit their Aunt Isabelle, in the small Massachusetts town where the Owens family has been blamed for everything that has ever gone wrong, they uncover family secrets and begin to understand the truth of who they are. Yet, the children cannot escape love even if they try, just as they cannot escape the pains of the human heart. The two beautiful sisters will grow up to be the memorable aunts in Practical Magic, while Vincent, their beloved brother, will leave an unexpected legacy.
Alice Hoffman delivers "fairy-tale promise with real-life struggle" (The New York Times Book Review) in a story how the only remedy for being human is to be true to yourself. Thrilling and exquisite, real and fantastical, The Rules of Magic is "irresistible...the kind of book you race through, then pause at the last forty pages, savoring your final moments with the characters"
As someone who has never read (or seen) Practical magic, I came into this book with a completely fresh mind. I didn't know any of the characters or the premise of this story. I had only read the synopsis on the library website and thought it sounded interesting, so I borrowed it. This story was so much more than I expected. The beauty of Hoffman's writing, you feel what her characters are feeling. The pain of loss, the comfort and joy the siblings are able to find in each other. Even the squabbles that they have are all so very real. I love the touches of magic this book has without being a "magic" book. It feels like something that could actually happen, unlike other books with witches in it. The beauty of this family trying to figure out how to break this generational curse or figure out if that's even possible. It is something, that even if we can't directly relate to, we can understand. We might not all have literal curses, but we all carry around baggage from our families, generations of it. This book shows how we can slowly let it go... I just found that to profoundly beautiful.
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