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Title: The Book of Magic by Alice Hoffman
Details: Copyright 2021, Simon and Schuster
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "THE OWENS FAMILY HAS BEEN CURSED IN LOVE FOR MORE THAN THREE HUNDRED YEARS. BUT ALL OF THAT IS ABOUT TO CHANGE.
The novel begins in a library, the best place for a story to be conjured, when beloved aunt Jet Owens hears the deathwatch beetle and knows she has only seven days to live. Jet is not the only one in danger—the curse is already at work.
A frantic attempt to save a young man’s life spurs three generations of the Owens women, and one long-lost brother, to use their unusual gifts to break the curse as they travel from Paris to London to the English countryside where their ancestor Maria Owens first practiced the Unnamed Art. The younger generation discovers secrets that have been hidden from them in matters of both magic and love by Sally, their fiercely protective mother. As Kylie Owens uncovers the truth about who she is and what her own dark powers are, her aunt Franny comes to understand that she is ready to sacrifice everything for her family, and Sally Owens realizes that she is willing to give up everything for love.
The Book of Magic is a breathtaking conclusion that celebrates mothers and daughters, sisters and brothers, and anyone who has ever been in love."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I love Practical Magic and have enjoyed Alice Hoffman's writing. When I heard she had written two prequels, I sought them out, both The Rules of Magic and Magic Lessons. This is the first (and presumably only) sequel.
How I Liked It: We live in a society inundated with sequels, prequels, and reboots. Just look around you and be shocked by how much of what you see is actually building on a pre-existing franchise. Nostalgia and nostalgia cycles have always existed, but since about the Baby Boom, they've been kicked into high gear and now aren't just an industry in and of themselves, they're a monster that seemingly grows bigger and bigger every year. The fraught new century, which didn't even do us the courtesy of waiting, say, three years, before severely upending several major world orders has added to the urgency of the nostalgia industrial complex.
So it's not that surprising that a renown author of Hoffman's prestige with so very many different stories and universes to choose from would return to her most popular one (even if the film adaptation is more familiar to most than the book, which is frankly a loss).
Before I get into the summary of this book, here's a very quick summary of the Practical Magic series!
In Practical Magic (published in 1995), sisters Sally and Gillian (who are roughly one year apart in age), extremely young but Sally is old enough to read, must go live with their elderly aunts after their parents die in a car crash. Their aunts, who perform magical cures for the town, have a reputation, and the girls get it by proxy. After witnessing the lovesick women who come to the aunts for various embarrassing to horrifying spells with various embarrassing to horrifying results, they resolve to never fall in love and be one of those silly women. Sally is practical and sensible, while Gillian is wild. They go their separate ways as adults, and Sally has two children (spoiled, vain, badly-behaved Antonia and tall, "tomboyish" Kylie) with her husband before he dies of the curse. Sally moves away from the aunts and starts life anew before being disturbed by Gillian fleeing to her with a problem. The problem is resolved, but not before all parties undergo a transformation. The aunts become more loving and better at communicating, Sally and Gillian accept both their heritage and the fact they're in control of their own destinies (and each have a love interest), Antonia is suggested to be growing up and becoming less selfish and being changed by a new love interest of her own, and Kylie grows into the makeover Gillian gave her and it's suggested she has a love interest in her friend Gideon. The book ends happily, with the suggestion you can honor from where you've come and choose your own fate at the same time. It is a delightful book.
And there the matter rested, despite the popular (and not true to the book) screen adaptation, for more than twenty years until The Rules of Magic, published in 2017. It's a story about how the aunts got their start, and there's quite a bit of retroactive continuity. For one thing, the 1960s supposedly play a huge role but really only do on a surface level (seemingly every notable 1960s event is duly noted in the text whether it has anything to do with the story or not) which not only makes all the ages wrong in the original book, time and eras didn't really play a role in the original book. The aunts (Franny and Jet) are seen with their younger brother, Vincent. All three are warned against magic by their mother, but their wise-woman aunt clues them into their heritage. All face difficulties with the curse that whomever they love is fated to die tragically, and all find loopholes. The aunts' younger brother fakes his own death (thus evading the curse, at least a bit) after dodging the draft and starts a new life with his boyfriend in France and is briefly a semi-famous French singer. Before he realized he was gay, he (as a very young teenager) accidentally and unknowingly fathered a child that would be Sally's and Gillian's mother. We see the aunts negotiating their lives with the curse (Aunt Jet's "tragic love" is a love all right, but maybe her truer love lies in Manhattan, in a friend she makes that she visits regularly but is too terrified to call her actual love, given the curse; Aunt Franny's love has cancer so they decide to marry and enjoy life together as long as they can). Everything is in place for the aunts to receive Gillian and Sally and kick off the events of Practical Magic, save for the years being absolutely all wrong and some fudging other details.
This was a disappointing book and would've been much better as a stand-alone story unconnected with Practical Magic.
In 2020, Magic Lessons tells the story of much-discussed Maria Owens, the first Owens woman in the new world in the 1600s. A baby is left in the field of the local wise woman who takes her in and teaches her before being hunted down for witchcraft. The girl learns her biological mother dabbles in witchcraft and abandoned her as the result of an affair. While fleeing the only home she ever knew, her biological mother gets her as far as a journey to the tropics, where she lives for a time and meets a man from the colonies, who impregnates her as a teenager. With her baby, she heads to America to find him again, but falls in love for real with a sailor on the way. Convinced the man from the colonies must be her true love, she pursues and finds him, only to discover he's already married to a teenager with children and she's a dirty little secret. He sets her up in the woods and she starts practicing magic for the townsfolk semi-secretly. Unfortunately, his guilt and shame lead him to implicate her in the witchcraft trials and her daughter is stolen from her. She's freed with the help of the sailor, but it takes years to get her daughter back. Her daughter dabbles in magic herself, and when she's finally returned to her mother, she's bitter and dabbles in bad magic. A showdown for her daughter's life occurs, and ends well for all. Maria finds a way around the curse and lives (presumably) happily ever after. This is a fine addition to the Practical Magic cannon and is far apart enough from the original story that it's a fine story in and of itself.
Which brings us to last year's publication, this book.
The events of The Book of Magic take place roughly seven years (give or take) after the events of Practical Magic. Sally is widowed again, her love interest from the previous book she married and thanks to the curse (which turns out they most certainly did not break at the end like originally suggested) she also buried. She's working as a librarian, living with the aunts. Gillian, the fun-seeking free spirit in Practical Magic is now a researcher at MIT and still with her love interest, although she fears the curse and forces them to take precautions.
Gideon, Kylie's love interest and friend is now her boyfriend and she declares her love for him which results in a tragic accident leaving him in serious condition.
She discovers more about her family and the curse and finds the "left-handed magic" (this is a common folk name for magic of evil intent) book once owned by Maria Owens's daughter in the family library. She flies to England to set about undoing the curse.
The rest of the family scrambles to try to find her and stop her. Antonia, who is pregnant, finds herself a new love interest when she's supposed to be taking care of things at home in America.
Aunt Franny, Sally, and Gillian meet up with long-lost brother Vincent to go to England and start trying to find Kylie. Along the way, they find a powerful but stricken occultist that's a love interest for Sally, and Kylie has found plenty of trouble. Finally, a sacrifice must be made and the family pays a dear price to end the curse.
The book ends with Sally and the occultist's wedding and the suggestion of how life proceeded after that for the family.
Got all that?
Before reading this, I genuinely wondered about the prequels instead of doing a sequel, since a sequel would be fascinating. In Practical Magic, Kylie is suggested to have some occult powers of her own (seeing ghosts and auras) and given that nearly all parties seem to have underwent a genuine and realistic transformation, it'd be interesting to see that navigated. Unfortunately, that is definitely not this book.
So many characters have undergone a change, they feel unrecognizable. It's not just the years since we've seen them last, their pasts are referenced and plenty has been again ret-conned, even more so than in Rules of Magic. Sally has suddenly been taken with books her whole life, despite us seeing Sally's whole life in Practical Magic. Antonia, who was a spoiled beauty who did not get along with her sister (which bothered Sally, who assumed Antonia would be a responsible older sister as she was) and in the original book seems like she's entering an interesting redemption or at least reconsideration arc, has suddenly been practical and well-behaved all along, believing in science and becoming a medical student because of it, despite her having visions of her own (which were not mentioned in the original novel, unlike Kylie's powers). She and Kylie who fought viciously throughout Practical Magic and had a meaningful scene that when Kylie is in danger, Antonia helps her, suggesting much more to her, have in Book of Magic been close all along (yes, siblings who fight a lot can absolutely be close, but Sally and Gillian were suggested to be far more close than Antonia and Kylie). Antonia, who was generally considered to be a knock-out and made her sister feel self-conscious, is now generally considered not as attractive as her "conventional beauty" of a sister which is... strange.
More thornier, and I'll go into this more later, Antonia, who had a wild crush on a male teacher and ends up with a male love interest, Scott, at the end of Practical Magic, now identifies as a lesbian, and is carrying her friend (emphasis on friend) Scott's baby for him and his male partner (as well as for herself).
So these characters are mostly completely different from the ones in the book. Add to that a mishmash of new characters that aren't as well formed as they could be, and too much action with characters we barely know combined with versions of characters that haven't been as well established, and the book is mostly a confusing, not satisfying mess. While Practical Magic had a fairytale quality that lurked around its prose (and certainly had supernatural elements, or suggestions of them), The Book of Magic is full on magic war, complete with a plague that requires a life sacrificed. It's almost staggering how so much of Practical Magic felt natural and earned and so much of this absolutely does not. Romances are flashes and instant (and feel like it) and we don't really know the characters, so we don't really care. The happy ending is... fine, but from everything, Practical Magic already had a pretty strongly suggested happy ending.
The book has themes of beauty (seemingly every character we learn about how staggeringly physically attractive they are, especially regardless of age) and aging, of course, but they don't feel intended so much as repeated so tiringly it makes the characters boring. If everyone (or at least, a lot of the main characters) is staggering and so attractive-looking people years younger swoon at them, what exactly is the point of mentioning it? Older characters having style that younger characters envy and think about copying comes across less as telling us about those characters and more hammering home the "attractiveness" theme. It's not even in an age-positivity sort of way (and surely it'd be nice to read about characters of an age people dismiss written in a new way), it's as though anyone past the age of fifty or so being attractive and fashionable is so incomprehensible it has to be constantly remarked upon.
Hoffman's staggering gift for setting, so good in Practical Magic and Magic Lessons, falls somewhat short here. A shadow of the Hoffman magic shines on the rural English countryside (and its dishes) but it's a ghost of what she's capable of giving and this books needs all the actual magic it can get.
But okay, witchcraft (fantasy fictional) or Witchcraft (the real life spiritual practice which can also be a religion)? Mostly, it's witchcraft and that's a relief. While long-lost brother Vincent scrys (a real life form of divination) and references are made to the threefold law, harming none, and to the Goddess Hecate (including borrowing a bit of modern Pagan sayings), witches also don't cry, cry only black tears, don't have hearts and can't love, and can't sink (they float when they swim). This book even suggests after the magic has been purged out of one character, their tears are clear again. (Never mind of course that we've seen characters cry in Practical Magic and there was no mention of black tears anywhere.)
However, it's a bit fuzzy on how the "Unnamed Art" deviates from witchcraft:
"I'm not a witch," Kylie told the librarian. "My aunts are healers. They have a greenhouse, they grow herbs, and people come to them for remedies. It's nothing more than that."
"Witchery is not a choice. This is not the Unnamed Art, which women have been practicing for hundreds of years, perhaps since the beginning of time, training themselves to use herbs and green magic. It's a bloodline situation." When she still looked blank, he added, "An inheritance." (pg 137)
So we can assume it's Hoffman's own creations, mixed with both witchcraft and just the slightest hint of Witchcraft.
"There are no witches," Antonia said. "Only people who want to burn them." (pg 153)
But as I've said about witch fiction (and I'm absolutely not alone here), witchcraft and magic is almost always a stand-in for something else. The Book of Magic continues the feminist thread started by Magic Lessons about witchcraft and women's autonomy:
Those were the days when witchery was forbidden and women were harshly punished, judged to be dangerous creatures if they talked too much, or read books, or did their best to protect themselves from harm. (pg 4)
When she'd first come here, the Oak Room had refused to serve women at lunch, but that all changed in 1969 when Betty Friedan and fifteen other members of the National Organization for Women decided enough was enough and refused to leave. (pg 19)
All the same, there would always be women in such dire situations they were willing to yield to the left side, those who had no choice, who had been trapped, chained, reviled, cast aside. (pg 49)
It often began with women who were given away to men they didn't love, who were too poor to make their own decisions, who lived lives they would never have chosen, who couldn't be published but who wrote anyway, women who had been cursed, women who needed to save someone, no matter the cost. This was the dark side and to reach it a woman must take a chance, close her eyes, make the leap, do whatever must be done. (pg 107)
Be a forthright woman and all hell could break lose. (pg 151)
"If it isn't written down, it will likely be forgotten," Isabelle had told her. That was why women had been illiterate for so long; reading and writing gave power, and power was what had been so often denied to women. (pg 249)
"If a woman doesn't write her own history, there are very few that will." (pg 294)
Amelia Bassano struggled for her voice to be heard at a time when women's voices were silenced, no matter how brilliant they might be. (pg 383)
For its flaws, and there are many, the book does do a good job of tying together the events of The Rules of Magic with Magic Lessons and the new conflicts given to this book. The problem is it's only related in a surface form to the source material, Practical Magic. This would've been such a better series if the author hadn't been constrained to try to fit it into the Practical Magic cannon. Alice Hoffman is a brilliant, talented writer who can frequently pull off what many try but few accomplish and this would've been such a better series without the tenuous tie to the beloved (and frankly, pretty complete) universe.
In a world of sequels, prequels, and reboots, it's sometimes great to have a reminder about why the originals were so great in the first place. I just wish it wasn't at the expense of the story that first captivated us.
Notable: What year is it? There is nothing in Practical Magic to indicate it was not set in the year in which it was published, or around there (1995). But given the timeline of The Rules of Magic (which is more fixed), the events of both Practical Magic and The Book of Magic technically haven't happened yet. Which means this story, being a sequel, is set in the future at the time of both its publication and this review. We know Vincent "died" in the early 1970s in The Rules of Magic, which a character refers to as "nearly sixty years ago." Gillian and Sally sing "Bad Romance" at a public event.
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Tom was twenty-five years younger than Ian, but he had a reputation in town by the time he was twelve. It was a bad age, set between being a child and being a man, and people were often lost during that year. (pg 228)
Uh, twelve is absolutely still a child. And this doesn't read like it's the opinion of that character so much as a truism of the narrator.
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This gets tricky. Do I think adding Queer characters to stories that didn't originally have them is a good idea? SURE! Do you need to do it right so it doesn't just look like you're checking a box? EVEN SURER! There was nothing in the 1995 novel to indicate either Antonia nor Scott were Queer, and we meet them well into their teens. While this absolutely happens in real life (people don't realize until later) and those stories need to be told, Antonia and Scott are still fictional characters and this reads far too much like a recent addition. It's easy to have a Queer side character in 2021, it would've really meant something in 1995 (particularly if written well).
She had dated Scott Morrison in high school, but she had always preferred women and had several girlfriends, many of whose hearts were broken without Antonia even trying to accomplish that task. (pg 8)
Really wish we could've seen Antonia date girls in high school in the 1995 novel.
You'll love your child more deeply than you can imagine. It will happen to you and your husband."
"Lesbian," Antonia informed him.
"Wife?" the Reverend asked. "Girlfriend?" (pg 146)
You can have a preference for one gender over another and still be bisexual! Bisexual is attraction to all genders/attraction regardless of gender! Also, there are bisexual women for one reason or another that still identify as "lesbian"!
But sexuality is a complicated thing, let's say Antonia was figuring it out and definitely landed on "lesbian", as in she's only attracted to other women. Gotta say it would've been great and sadly still revolutionary to have a bisexual character be bisexual and know and say it.
Anyway, the curse probably didn't include lesbians," Ariel teased. "We probably didn't exist."
"We always existed and it's always been dangerous to fall in love with us." (pg 269)
Another vote for lesbian as the term.
I have to say, the same-gender romances in both The Rules of Magic and The Book of Magic don't compare to the straight ones which are the centerpiece. Even the happy ending of this book revolves around Sally's wedding to the male occultist, not Antonia and not Vincent.
I'm in favor of adding diversity in any form, but again, no tokenism and it has to be done carefully and thoughtfully. We aren't just demographic boxes to check, and that's what this felt like, sadly. It's especially sad given how poetically and authentically Hoffman can write a romance between characters.
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It was a book of practical magic, containing their history, past, present, and future, with plenty of blank pages for the future, Franny had made sure of that. (pg 340 and 341)
And we have a title! Go read the original and you may decide as I did that in your personal cannon, that's where the story ends.
Final Grade: C
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