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Title: Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman
Details: Copyright 2020, Simon and Schuster
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "IN AN UNFORGETTABLE NOVEL THAT TRACES A CENTURIES-OLD CURSE TO ITS SOURCE, BELOVED AUTHOR ALICE HOFFMAN UNVEILS THE STORY OF MARIA OWENS, ACCUSED OF WITCHCRAFT IN SALEM, AND MATRIARCH OF A LINE OF THE AMAZING OWENS WOMEN AND MEN FEATURED IN PRACTICAL MAGIC AND THE RULES OF MAGIC.
Where does the story of the Owens bloodline begin? With Maria Owens, in the 1600s, when she’s abandoned in a snowy field in rural England as a baby. Under the care of Hannah Owens, Maria learns about the “Unnamed Arts.” Hannah recognizes that Maria has a gift and she teaches the girl all she knows. It is here that she learns her first important lesson: Always love someone who will love you back.
When Maria is abandoned by the man who has declared his love for her, she follows him to Salem, Massachusetts. Here she invokes the curse that will haunt her family. And it’s here that she learns the rules of magic and the lesson that she will carry with her for the rest of her life. Love is the only thing that matters.
Magic Lessons is a celebration of life and love and a showcase of Alice Hoffman’s masterful storytelling."
Why I Wanted to Read It: The second of two prequels to Practical Magic! The first is here and it also recaps the plot of the source material, Practical Magic, if you are unfamiliar.
How I Liked It: What's the point of a prequel? That's the question I answered in my previous review. The point of a prequel is (I repeat) another story in the same universe, and it often tells us how things got the way they did in the original story. The best prequels don't just give us another look into a universe we enjoy, they help us enjoy the original story even more and give it added depth. While I more or less enjoyed The Rules of Magic as a story in and of itself, I felt it came up a bit short in the prequel department as far as its source material, Practical Magic. This is set far earlier, "where the story began", with the oft-mentioned ancestor Maria Owens.
The story begins with a crow saving the life of a baby abandoned in the snow. The crow leads the town wise woman, Hannah Owens, who adopts the baby and names her Maria. Maria grows up educated on witchy ways by Hannah (including a vision of a man who will give her diamonds), and even learns who her real mother is and why she was abandoned, right up until Hannah faces persecution and sends Maria to safety (along with the crow who found her, who is her familiar).
Maria makes her way to the Dutch island of Curaçao, making friends with Juni, a fellow servant girl (and daughter of a slave) around her own age and Juni's magic-making great aunt, with whom Maria both learns and trades magic tips. At fifteen (yikes) Maria attracts the attention of the much older (late thirties) John Hathorne (a fictional version of the notorious real life Salem magistrate) from the Colonies. They have a dalliance and he is infatuated, as is she. He leaves the island to return home and she discovers she is pregnant. After giving birth, she pursues Hathorne to the New World, but first she has to travel there on a ship and save the life of a handsome, slightly more age-appropriate sailor, Samuel Dias, who falls in love with her and is tender and caring to her baby daughter Faith. Still, Maria chases what she thinks is her destiny, Hathorne, into Salem.
Hathorne dallies with her in a little shack off from town, but surprise! He already has a family, and a gross thing about young teenage girls, apparently (his wife is not much older than Maria and was fourteen when she married Hathorne). Humiliated and furious, Hathorne both is and isn't her island romance as he juggles two families and his reputation and official duties and Maria realizes he's not who she thought he was at all. Hathorne slips further and further into witch-hunting hysteria (and we know why) and paranoia, particularly about the fact he fathered a child out of wedlock and is petrified of anyone finding out, particularly given the fact the child's mother is a witch.
Maria becomes well-known in town for her cures and a jealous, childless neighbor wants her young daughter for her own, so she hatches a scheme to get Maria in jail for witchcraft, and takes the child. Through some trickery and some help from Samuel the sailor, who has returned to her, Maria is able to escape her fate. From there, she attempts to get her daughter back, only to find that the scheming neighbor has fled town. Maria sets up shop in New York City with Samuel and his father and while hunting for her lost daughter, she performs cures for the city folk.
Meanwhile, Maria's daughter Faith practices her gifts, in secret, in fear of her horrible captor. She becomes well-known (in secret) for having cures. As Maria tries to get her daughter back, her daughter tries to get back to her, until finally one night Faith manages to escape (with the help of a charming Englishman) and mother and daughter are reunited.
But Faith's five years with her captor have left her wanting vengeance and justice, especially when she discovers the identify of her biological father. Against her mother's wishes, she both starts practicing sinister magic and heads back to Salem to exact revenge. For her anger, though, Faith is at heart still a good person, and can't bring herself to truly hurt Hathorne (or his family; it's revealed his wife was basically miserably swept into marriage, and she recognizes Faith as her husband's biological daughter through her servant ruse but reveals nothing). In Faith's trickery, though, she manages to almost drown and her mother and Samuel rush back to Salem try to save Faith and risk their lives saving hers and pay a steep price.
From there, they move on as best they can, with hope from their trauma and a renewed appreciation for life. Faith repents from negative magic and abusing her power, and Maria builds the house that will become the infamous Owens house on the spot of land (which she now owns) where the shack Hathorne once secretly stored her was.
Maybe it's because this is set so much before the events of Practical Magic and thus doesn't have to constrain itself to fit, but I enjoyed this far more as a sequel than I did The Rules of Magic. Maria in both previous books in the series is something of a mythological figure and her story is shrouded in legend (one story goes that a villager shot a crow and Maria turned up the next day with her arm in a sling, clearly proving she could shape-shift). This Maria we get to see in detail and the author does a great job with the truth of the legends (crazed villagers on a rampage against crows start shooting indiscriminately and Maria tries to protect her own crow familiar and is injured).
The Owens curse (wherein Maria cursed any man that loves an Owens woman) I've mentioned before is a fascinating and frustrating plot point to get around and it's interesting to see the author find a way and Maria ultimately has a happy ending. Similar but lesser constrictions (the famous Owens house, a few of the other legendary stories) feel natural rather than a forced afterthought and it genuinely feels like we're seeing the truth beyond a legend.
While I had quibbles with The Rules of Magic sounding historically accurate, the author wisely realizes that unlike the 1960s, no one alive remembers the 1600s (if you're a vampire, you're not alive; if you're a time-traveler, you don't remember it, you visited it) and the speech would probably have trouble landing to modern ears anyway, so she settles on a comfortable modern tone with enough historical touches to not take us out of the setting.
I mentioned previously about Witchcraft (the religious/spiritual practice) and witchcraft (the fantasy, make-believe stuff ala The Wizard of Oz) and how modern authors describing fantasy witchcraft often apparently feel they have to borrow from real Witchcraft, as real Witchcraft's profile rises. Where festivals and terms were frequently borrowed in Rules, here primarily the magic is from the author's own mythology (witches tarnish iron, iron bracelets restrain witchcraft) although there are a few general "cunning magic" asides and herbal cures. What few nods to actual Witchcraft are interesting, with both historically accurate properties of flowers and herbs (rosemary for remembrance, roses for love) and this passage in particular:
Rebecca wore several amulets and charms, acorns and agate strung on red thread and a brass circle onto which a pentacle had been etched. (pg 28)
Faith's later struggle with sinister magic does what good fantasy witchcraft descriptions usually do, act as a metaphor for something else, in this case wielding power of any sort, and how when Faith uses such negative magic, she herself is diminished.
It's also worth note of when Maria considers what to do with a "bad" magic book Faith gives her after she's reformed, lamenting "I used it badly. It shouldn't be mine."
There were reasons dark books were written by women, those who were not allowed to publish, those who couldn't own property, those who had been sold for sex, those who had grown old and were no longer desirable, women in chains, women who dreamed, women who had turned left when it seemed the only choice. If used carefully, by the right person, the magic in this text could be a great gift. (pg 393)
(For those unaware, the "left-hand path" is what's generally referred to negative magic.)
I should also note that Maria frequently holds her own in a feminist way, refusing to be constricted by the boundaries of her time and place. The book more than suggests that tendency indicates her as a witch to the witch-hunting townsfolk far more than any spells she casts. All in all, the witchhunting/witchhunted metaphor works considerably better here than it did other places.
Also of note is the author's continued exploration into the history of New York City. Much like in Rules, it's an authentic-feeling New York City that's far more interesting than the usual retread fictional version.
The book is genuinely surprising, incredibly compelling, and a damn good read that lives up to the potential of Practical Magic, its source material, and adds depth and backstory. It's also an utterly fascinating story entirely in its own right and the characters are so developed this could've been a book series in and of itself, rather than just a book. You can't ask for much more from a prequel than that.
Final Grade: A
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