Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

“The moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep.”

For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in their Massachusetts town. Gillian and Sally have endured that fate as well: as children, the sisters were forever outsiders, taunted, talked about, pointed at. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, with their musty house and their exotic concoctions and their crowd of black cats. But all Gillian and Sally wanted was to escape. One will do so by marrying, the other by running away. But the bonds they share will bring them back, almost as if by magic…

Charming, wicked. But also superficial and almost too flighty to take seriously or to dismiss as a prolonged adult fairy tale outright. The characters are all indisputably unique, so why do they sound exactly the same, with that similar tone of… Dullness? For a long time it felt like a story was continually being set up but never quite happening. I’ve never seen the film but have a hunch it might be better than the novel because there’s a lot of padding in the book, lots of asides.

I had to rate this novel only three stars. The story jumps around like some impatient child, from characters to images with little consideration for a reader who just wants a solid good story: the practical magic of a well-told novel. Maybe the movie will be better…