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An instant New York Times bestseller and Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick from beloved author Alice Hoffman--the spellbinding prequel to Practical Magic .
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" ( USA TODAY , 4/4 stars).
Reseñas (2)
Reseña de New York Review of Books
NOVELS FLOW FROM Alice Hoffman with the reliability of leaves falling in autumn. Since her first, "Property Of," published in 1977 when she was 25, Hoffman has averaged a book a year - more than 30 novels, three collections of short fiction and eight books for children and young adults. But Hoffman's latest offering, "The Rules of Magic," is likely to attract particular attention because it's a prequel to her 1995 novel, "Practical Magic," perhaps the best-known work of her career and the basis for the 1998 film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as the sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, born into a Massachusetts family whose founding matriarch escaped Salem's gallows by magicking herself out of her noose. People who know only the film version may be surprised to learn that "the aunts," as Sally and Gillian refer to their guardians, are thinly sketched characters for most of "Practical Magic." Though they're described as part of a long line of beautiful Owens women with gray eyes and an intrinsic understanding of how plants (and animal organs) can cure various ailments (principally lovesickness), most of what readers learn about the older sisters borders on witchy caricature: They're peculiar and reclusive, with long white hair and crooked spines. Readers don't even know their names - Frances, called Franny, and Bridget, known as Jet- until late in that novel's last act. Hoffman has now returned to fill out their portraits, providing a back story that thoroughly upends what we thought we knew about them. The Owens sisters had a baby brother! The only male Owens in centuries was the third child of Susanna, an Owens who skedaddled out of Massachusetts as soon as she could, desperate to remove herself from the stigma clinging to her family name. She flees Boston for Paris, then settles in New York, where she and her psychiatrist husband (a real drip) try without success to repress any inclinations toward witchcraft their children might harbor. The house rules are all about prohibition: "No walking in the moonlight, no Ouija boards, no candles, no red shoes, no wearing black, no going shoeless, no amulets, no nightblooming flowers, no reading novels about magic, no cats, no crows and no venturing below 14 th Street." Firstborn Franny, pale as porcelain, with "blood-red" hair and "an ability to commune with birds," mostly abides by those rules, as does the shy beauty, Jet, whose knack for reading people's thoughts allows her to skirt a lot of missteps. But Vincent, so charismatic even as a newborn that a nurse tried to spirit him out of the hospital hidden inside her coat, is not yet a teenager before he's south of 14 th Street, strumming his guitar on street corners in Greenwich Village as the 1960s dawn. The children live uncomfortably in their skins until Franny turns 17 and, in accordance with generations of tradition, is summoned to spend the summer at the family manor, where the current matriarch is Aunt Isabelle. For narrative convenience, Franny's siblings travel with her. And all their mother's carefully concocted strictures unravel in a single vacation. From Isabelle, the siblings learn to make black soap and which herbs will cause a married man to leave his wife. More dramatically, from their rebellious cousin April they learn about the curse laid on the family by Maria Owens, who escaped hanging but was spurned by her paramour: Any man who loves an Owens is doomed. Talk about your summers of transformation. What teenager wants to fall in love if it means your lover dies? It's tough to top a dead body in a car, the event that drove the plot in "Practical Magic," and Hoffman doesn't try. Instead she goes for historical sweep, setting the Owens siblings' saga against the backdrop of real events like the Vietnam War, San Francisco's Summer of Love and the Stonewall riots. But this is a novel that begins with the words, "Once upon a time," and its strength is a Hoffman hallmark: the commingling of fairy-tale promise with real-life struggle. The Owens children can't escape who they are. Like the rest of us, they have to figure out the best way to put their powers to use. SUE CORBETT is the author of the novels "12 Again," "Free Baseball" and "The Last Newspaper Boy in America."
Library Journal Review
Hoffman weaves a spell around the three Owens children-Franny, Jet, and -Vincent-as she provides the backstory to her best-selling Practical Magic. The family of witches has been cursed since the 17th century, and as the Owens siblings come of age during 1960s, their second sight, magic potions, and other supernatural abilities are not enough to keep them from the danger of falling in love and seeing their beloved die. How each deals with the consequences and learns to fight the curse by loving more, not less, is the key to freedom from the spell and an instruction to readers. Hoffman deftly weaves in dramatic events from the era, including the Vietnam War and protests against it, without sacrificing the fairy-tale feeling of her story. VERDICT Admirers of Practical Magic and readers who enjoy a little magic mixed in with their love stories and prefer to be kept at something of a remove from the grittiness of life's tragedies will relish this book. [See Prepub Alert, 5/3/17.]--Sharon Mensing, Emerald Mountain School, Steamboat Springs, CO © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.