It is past midnight in late June, the air on Long Island is thick enough to drink, and a ring has formed around the moon, then a second one, knotted into the first. Sally Owens wakes because someone is tapping at her screen door. On the porch stands the younger sister she has seen only three times in eighteen years, sand in her boots, a little green snake tattooed on her wrist, shaking so badly she has to lean on the brickwork. In the driveway sits an Oldsmobile with a man slumped in the passenger seat. Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman has been building towards this knock for fifty pages, and when it comes the whole novel changes key.
Why Practical Magic Treats Love as the Dangerous Spell
Everything that follows has its roots in a winter evening years earlier. The two girls, sitting barefoot on the back stairs of their aunts’ house in Massachusetts, watch a plain, kind young woman from the drugstore beg for a charm to win a married man. The aunts warn her that what is done cannot be undone. She gets exactly what she asked for, and it ruins her. The sisters lock little fingers in the dark and swear they will never be governed by desire.
That vow is the spine of Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman, and the book’s quiet wit lies in how completely both women break it. Sally, the sister who keeps the ledger, marries for love and is flattened by grief. Gillian, the one who always leaves first, collects husbands and finally a man who hits her, a man she has been sedating each night with small doses of deadly nightshade to keep him from drinking. Hoffman is clear-eyed about him. The passages about life with Jimmy are among the hardest she has written, frank about fear, sex and the habit of apologising for being hurt, and they sit oddly, and deliberately, against the book’s fairy-tale surface.
What the novel argues is that desire is not the enemy; denial is. Sally’s sensible suburb, with its tofu dinners and white fence, is a fortress built from that one evening on the stairs, and it does not keep anything out.
The Women Who Inherited the Sight
The second thread of Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman belongs to the next generation. Sally’s daughters, sixteen-year-old Antonia and Kylie, about to turn thirteen, have spent years being kept normal, and the summer of their aunt’s arrival undoes that. Kylie, gangly and kind, starts to see colours rising off people: green jealousy at the edges of her sister, the dark of fear around her mother. Then she sees a man in the back yard whom nobody else can, and the novel tips into a ghost story told with real chill.
Hoffman is wonderful on adolescence as a kind of second sight. Kylie’s new ability is also the plain misery of being thirteen and noticing everything, and her best friend Gideon, shaven-headed and permanently disgusting, gives the book some of its funniest pages. Antonia, beautiful and cruel, gets less room, and her romance with a Harvard boy delivering ice cream syrup is sketched rather than earned.
Domestic magic is everywhere, never explained. When love is under a roof, the butter will not stay solid, even in the fridge. A woman who has lost her son weeps on the pavement for no reason she could name. Readers expecting broomsticks will find instead a world in which feeling leaks into the furniture. That is the particular achievement of Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman: the uncanny is never a set piece, only a household fact, as ordinary to the Owens women as the weather and about as easy to argue with.
The aunts, Frances and Jet, are the novel’s secret weapon even though they are offstage for most of it. Stern, unsentimental and devoted in a way they would never admit, they raised two frightened girls on candy bars, black soap and no bedtimes, and the book’s slow reveal of what that cost them is one of its tenderest effects.
A Narrator Who Already Knows the Ending
The book’s voice is its great asset and its main fault. Hoffman narrates from somewhere above the story, swooping into anyone’s head, the investigator from Tucson and the ice cream delivery boy included, and she loves to leap years ahead to say what a character will remember long after. Those leaps give scenes a lovely fated glow. They also drain suspense. When the narrator has told you the sisters will one day phone each other just to stay on the line, the present-tense crisis in the garden feels already settled.
The reservations in Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman pile up in the final third. Gary Hallet, the investigator who arrives with a letter Sally wrote to her sister, is a gentle, weeping cowboy so plainly designed to be loved that he barely registers as a person, and he resembles the other suitor far too closely. The threat that has grown all summer is defused in a few brisk pages. And Hoffman tells us how people feel at such length that some chapters read like summaries of scenes rather than scenes. For a book club, the unease it leaves, in its mix of grief, abuse, animal cruelty and frank sex under a whimsical surface, will be as much a talking point as its charm.
The Writer Behind Practical Magic
Hoffman’s birthplace was Manhattan, in 1952, and she was raised on Long Island, the same flat, hedge-lined landscape where Sally tries to hide her daughters. She studied at Adelphi University and won a fellowship to Stanford’s creative writing programme, and while she was still a student there a story of hers caught the eye of the editor Ted Solotaroff, who asked whether she had a novel. She did not, so she wrote one.
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman came out in 1995, and three years later Warner Bros. made it a film with Sandra Bullock as Sally and Nicole Kidman as Gillian, and Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest as the aunts. The film is softer and sillier than the novel, but it has kept the Owens name alive for a generation of viewers, and all four actresses came back for this year’s sequel.
Hoffman returned to the family beginning in 2017, with two prequels and then a closing sequel, which is the book that second film adapts, and none of the later volumes is needed to enjoy this one. A stage musical is also in development, with Hoffman co-writing the book and Norah Jones co-writing the songs.
After the Last Page
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman is less tightly made than its reputation suggests, and its men are cardboard. But the sisters, the folklore and the aunts, sour and fearless, linger long after the plot has gone. Readers who want more of that kitchen-table enchantment should try Paper Ghosts by Sarah Addison Allen, in which three generations of women share one house and inherit each other’s wounds, or Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, where feeling seeps into food. Hoffman’s own The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman carries the same Massachusetts weather into darker history.
The knock at the screen door comes in June. By the time the novel lets go, the lesson the sisters swore to on the back stairs has turned inside out, and the reader is left, like them, ready to risk the spell.