Practical Magic
by Alice Hoffman
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alice HoffmanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2003-08-05
ISBN: 0425190374
Number of pages: 286
Publisher: Berkley Trade
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780425190371
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Book Reviews of Practical Magic
Book Review: Good book, better movie
Summary: 3 Stars
I had to think about this book for awhile after finishing it to clarify what I thought about it. I'd seen the movie several times and the last time saw that it was based on a book. Since I usually love the book way more than the movie I picked this up. Hollywood really romanticized and simplified much of what was in the book, still while reading the book I enjoyed comparing the two stories and various plot points, enjoying different aspects, like the fact that the girls were given a more substantial role in the book and the fact that Sally left home rather than subject her girls to the same ostracizing that she received as a child. So if you saw the movie and you're interested in seeing the author's original intent for the characters, buy this book. To be honest, I don't think I would have enjoyed this book if not for the opportunity to compare it to the film version and then get some plot and character questions answered.
Summary of Practical Magic
For more than two hundred years, the Owens women had been blamed for everything that went wrong in their Massachusetts town. And Gillian and Sally endured that fate as well; as children, the sisters were outsiders. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, but all Gillian and Sally wanted was to escape. One would do so by marrying, the other by running away. But the bonds they shared brought them back-almost as if by magic...For most adults, fairy tales are among the childish things we've put away. Alice Hoffman, however, feels differently. Practical Magic starts out as a tale of Gillian and Sally Owens, two orphaned girls whose aunts are witches--of a mild sort. For the past two centuries, Owens women have been blamed for all that has gone wrong in their Massachusetts town, ever since their ancestor arrived, rich, independent, and soon accused of theft: "And then one day, a farmer winged a crow in his cornfield, a creature who'd been stealing from him shamelessly for months. When Maria Owens appeared the very next morning with her arm in a sling and her white hand wound up in a white bandage, people felt certain they knew the reason why." The aunts are daily ostracized by the same upstanding citizens who sneak to their house at night for magical love cures. To the sisters they are for the most part benevolently absent, though their bell, book, and candle routine makes life a torment for Gillian, beautiful and blonde and lazy, and Sally, who's all too responsible. But when one of the aunts' cures works too well, ending as a curse, the dangers of real love become all too clear. In Hoffman's world being bewitched, bothered, and bewildered is no mere metaphor--and neither is desire. The elbows of one enamored man pucker a linoleum counter, another walks around with singed cuffs. It's difficult to catch the author's power in brief quotes. She needs space and increment to build her exquisite variations of vision and reality, her matter-of-fact announcements of the preternatural. Practical Magic again and again makes one recall the thrill of hearing at bedtime, "Now will I a tale unfold..." --Kerry Fried
Hoffman, Alice Books
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