Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

4.0/5

The Owens women have been burdened by love for hundreds of years. Sally and Gillian were not the exceptions to the rule. During childhood, they spent their days living with their three aunts, playing in the garden and being neglected by those around them for being "witches." They spent countless nights staring through a crack in a door watching their aunts make potions and perform rituals to help women who have crumbled at the hands of love. After witnessing a rather gruesome ceremony, the sisters vowed to never let love control them. Gillian, a free spirit, left behind a trail of broken hearts. Sally, very grounded, married a wonderful man who she had two children with. When her husband met his demise, everything changed. Sally packed up the children and moved across the country and Gillian went wherever her heart decided. Years later, Gillian shows up at Sally's door unannounced with her most recent love affair, dead in the car. It is then that the sisters have to work together to clean up this mess, break the curse, and try to live normal lives with a slightly witchy heritage. This book was captivating and shows what it is like to be magic in the real world.

Practical Magic was the eleventh book written by The New York Times bestselling author Alice Hoffman. It was published originally in 1995 but was re-released on August 5th of 2003 by Penguin Publishing Group. Alice Hoffman was born in New York City on March 16, 1952 and grew up on Long Island. After graduating from high school in 1969, she attended Adelphi University, from which she received a BA, and then received a Mirrellees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, which she attended in 1973 and 74, receiving an MA in creative writing.  She currently lives in Boston. Hoffman’s first novel, Property Of, was written at the age of twenty-one, while she was studying at Stanford, and published shortly thereafter by Farrar Straus and Giroux. She credits her mentor, professor and writer Albert J. Guerard, and his wife, the writer Maclin Bocock Guerard, for helping her to publish her first short story in the magazine Fiction. Editor Ted Solotaroff then contacted her to ask if she had a novel, at which point she quickly began to write what was to become Property Of, a section of which was published in Mr. Solotaroff’s magazine, American Review.

Since that remarkable beginning, Alice Hoffman has become one of our most distinguished novelists. She has published over thirty novels, three books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults. Her novel, Here on Earth, an Oprah Book Club choice, was a modern reworking of some of the themes of Emily Bronte’s masterpiece Wuthering Heights. Practical Magic was made into a Warner film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Her novel, At Risk, which concerns a family dealing with AIDS, can be found on the reading lists of many universities, colleges and secondary schools. Hoffman’s advance from Local Girls, a collection of inter-related fictions about love and loss on Long Island, was donated to help create the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA. Hoffman has written a number of novels for young adults, including Aquamarine, Green Angel, and the New York Time bestseller The Ice Queen. In 2007 Little Brown published the teen novel Incantation, a story about hidden Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, which Publishers Weekly has chosen as one of the best books of the year. Her novels have received mention as notable books of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People Magazine. She has also worked as a screenwriter and is the author of the original screenplay “Independence Day,” a film starring Kathleen Quinlan and Diane Wiest. Her teen novel Aquamarine was made into a film starring Emma Roberts. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, Harvard Review, Ploughshares and other magazines.