BOOK REVIEW: Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman ★☆☆☆☆

WARNING. SPOILERS AHEAD AND SWEARING.

Sally and Gillian Owens are two distinctive sisters. Sally is the brunette, who’s homey and full of self-pity. Gillian is blonde, full of life and makes bad choices. And that’s about it.

I’m sorry, but this is going to be a full-on rant, addressing a lot of issues.

I had very high expectations, purely because the movie which was so much better. No wonder it’s a classic. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman have great chemistry and brought so much to the characters. The movie plot was refined and got rid of a lot of unnecessary things the book dragged on.

Here’s the plotline. In a small Massachusetts town, for more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong. Young orphans Gillian and Sally have endured a terrible fate: As children, they were forever outsiders, taunted by peers, talked about, pointed at. Their elderly aunts just about brew everything, especially love potions which seems to encourage the whispers of witchery, along with their ancestral darkened house, and love for black felines. To escape from such a terrible fate, Gillian runs away and Sally gets married to Michael, has two daughters. Life’s swell until, inevitably, the curse kills her husband. They begin to lead different lives, but one-night Gillian comes back with the dead body of her abusive boyfriend Jimmy in the car. Upheaving Sally’s life, they bury him in the back garden and try to make do with their lives until Gary, the police detective, comes knocking on their door.

I was expecting a nice feel-good story about love, family, sisterly bonds with a bit of magic involved. There was HARDLY ANY MAGIC. Like did I miss the book title? Are they not witches? Are they healers? I felt cheated because there was no mention of their magical abilities. I kept pushing through this book, hoping to find out something about their family legacy. There was a mention of their ancestor Maria Owens, a young, pregnant witch, who was rebuffed by her lover casts a spell to stop herself from ever falling in love again. The spell turned into a curse, affecting only the future generations of women in the Owens family. The curse is either not finding true love or any man who falls in love them will die. But it was easily forgotten because the plot, pacing and soon the writing was all over the place.

I wanted to like this book, but this was a struggle to read and I only read it for the sake of reading it. Part One started great, delving into a complex relationship between the sisters, the aunts and the men (psychotic or not) who enter their lives. Hoffman started setting the scene with quaint descriptions, the talkative narration was fine until it all became a bit too much with long-winded descriptions and unlikable characters. Suddenly, the tensing and perspective was all over the place. It started in the past tense telling the story of Gillian & Sally’s childhood, teen years, and later switched to present tense and then out of nowhere future past tense, mid-page. And what was the need for intricate descriptions of the tiniest insignificant things? There were about half page paragraphs about things that happened years later all because of a small side character saw how pretty someone was after her haircut. Sure, mentioning it once is fine, but there was no need to remind us once every other page. It made the pace choppy and the writing style was mentally draining to read.

There so much prose on emotions that made the plot and pacing drag on. The dialogue, in my opinion, was stale with non-existent chapters (written in four large chunks instead of in a chapter format) which annoyed me. Instead of building a steady pace towards a climax, this book’s climax was so quick I didn’t have time to comprehend it. It leaves on a notion that Sally may have found love but it was overshadowed with Gillian’s description of her beauty.

These characters were just miserable, shallow people, full of contradictions; like Gillian maintaining her slender figure on a diet of soda, Snickers, etc but at the same time rebuking her young niece about eating carbs. Sally’s meant to be this wonderful and hardworking mother whose daughters, the eldest Antonia and the younger Kylie are anything but likeable. Antonia is described as naturally beautiful (of course) who’s spoiled and downright mean. Kylie is the awkward adolescence with yet again beautiful, but we’re supposed to like her. The author gives no reasons any of these Owens women are remarkable apart from their looks. The aunts, as Hoffman portrays, are loving and caring, yet they were barely in the story and when they were, it was to raise the girls to be immature, irresponsible and did nothing to help the girls through their bullying. They should not be allowed to take care of kids. They let Sally and Gillian do whatever they want. No discipline in that household whatsoever! They barely tolerate each other to the point the Gillian eloped with a guy when she was a teenager and left Sally to deal with everything.

And what can I say about Sally and Gillian, the two protagonist who are defined for their singular trait of mainstream physical beauty into two types of personified beauty: Sally’s the modest, bookish, humble, ordinary beauty and Gillian’s the opposite with her overly confident traffic-stopping beauty. That is it. This book had an obsession with Owens having aesthetic looks. I couldn’t give a fig about Antonia and Kylie’s love life and the fact they’re just imitations of their mother and aunt. Antonia looks like Gillian, but Kylie who looks like Sally wants to be just like Gillian. WHO CARES? I’m glad they weren’t portrayed as teenagers in the movie.

Sally’s main love interest (more like sex interest…I’ll get to that later) Gary doesn’t show up until the last, let’s say, 20% of the book, which shows his only purpose was to be the just that. Hoffman tried to give him personality and backstory crammed into a few pages, but it would have worked properly if he had been introduced earlier on.

Even after the choppy storyline, writing style and bad characters, there was something unexpected that really, REALLY pissed me off. The attempt at romanticising rape and sexual abuse. Cringey to the point of absolute disgust. Hoffman makes it out as if all the men who are attracted to the Owens’ are sexually frustrated predators. The men, like Jimmy, Gary, Ben (with the exception of Michael) and countless others in this story were there just to be creepy. Maybe that’s meant to be a side effect of the curse that was actually mentioned THE ONCE, but all the men are sexually attracted (border line rapist) to the Owens (apart from the old aunts). Men are ‘falling for the Owens girls’ in ludicrous ways; like teenage boys will follow Gillian around like lost puppies. Take Kylie, for example, she’s this clumsy, emotional wreck of a thirteen years old, suddenly becomes a bombshell (with a new haircut dyed blonde) that makes her only male best friend quickly besotted with her.

Plus, what is up with the love interests? Ben and Gary are meant to be the ones who show these cursed women that love can be good (for Gillian), and love doesn't have to end badly (for Sally). Instead, they become sex interests. Hoffman does not know the difference between love and lust – totally clueless! All the ‘romantic relationships’ are all based on sex and falling ‘in love’ at first sight malarkey. What was meant to be a book about family bonds ended up being about the Owen sisters and daughters are somehow super-hot that they make grown men wet with the desire to marry or fantasize about raping them. Yes, you read that – RAPE. Here’s an example that grinds my gears.

Sally, burdened with guilt (Jimmy’s dead body in the back garden) wants to come clean to Gary. She meets him in his car and quite suddenly they start to make out. Sally comes to her senses and stops because, since Michael’s death, she doesn’t want to love again. She fears the curse and she doesn't want to be like those distressed women, in her childhood, who’d come to the aunts’ house after twilight, desperate for love spells. She wants to stop things before they go any further, but Gary has other ideas:

"At this moment, Gary wishes he could grab her and force her, at least until she gave in. He'd like to make love to her right here, he'd like to do it all night and not give a damn about anything else, and not listen if she told him no. But he's not that kind of man, and he never will be.”

I don’t know about you, but this clearly sounds like rape – if you’re forcing someone to have sex with you – THAT IS RAPE! He’d like to do it, but he doesn’t, but he really would. OMG, I wish Michael would rise from the dead and murder him. Gary wants to fuck Sally that he starts fantasising about it whilst sitting in traffic.

And that was just one example. There are infinitely more. In another scene, Gillian, although she loves Ben, believes she doesn’t deserve to be loved, wants him to stop contacting her. That’s right, she tries to turn down the guy but instead of respecting her wishes and backing off like a gentleman, he harasses her by phone calls and stalking by refusing to move from the porch. All he can think about is wanting to have sex with her. Eventually, he fucks her in the hallway of his house.

WTF did I actually read? I guess this thing was considered romantic in 1995, but c’mon anyone can see this as not normal behaviour. There was no sweet thoughts or romantic notions. It was just Hoffman saying men would want to fuck (not make love… more like rough sex) with the Owen women, they would salivate and think about fucking them in inappropriate circumstances, in hallways, on tables, literally anywhere! Not making love. Just fucking. It’s like the concept of true love; kindness, a personal connection, flew over Hoffman’s head, turning love into carnal lust.

There’s always that one book you’d regret reading. Practical Magic was not a pleasant experience to read. What probably got me through this was the hope of finding some redeemable character. But my hopes were diminished. This book was such a disappointment. It lacked quality, had no rhyme with too many thoughts written sporadically, the storyline overly negative and crude. Tedious repetitions about what will happen in the future and how much a character wants to fuck someone else.

Practical Magic may have been saved if the plot did not heavily rely on fucking the Owen women. Imagine if Gary wasn’t thinking about rape and Ben had given Gillian some space, I would have liked this book. The two would have been able to grow in character and relationship.

I cannot stress how much I will not recommend this book that left me frustrated because I read all of it when I should not have. I wasted my time. I mean, I hope Hoffman’s prequel The Rules of Magic is any better. Because I swear if it’s like this dribble, then I don’t have the time to be wasted on bad books.

Rating: 1/5
Publishers: Scribner
Publication date: October 19th 2017 (first published July 1st 1995)
Genre: Fantasy/Romance/Paranormal