Practical Magic Is Messier Than You Remember

Two sisters, a house full of dead lovers, and a town that never lets them forget it

Here’s the setup, and it’s a good one: Sally and Gillian Owens are orphaned sisters raised by their two aunts in a crumbling house at the edge of town, the kind of house kids dare each other to touch the fence of. The aunts are witches, or close enough, the kind who read tea leaves and grow belladonna next to the tomatoes and never seem bothered by the fact the whole town is scared of them. Sally wants nothing to do with any of it. She wants a normal life, a lawn, a husband who doesn’t die young (there’s a family curse about that, casually mentioned like it’s a peanut allergy). Gillian wants the opposite: drama, men, distance from Massachusetts and from herself.

Then Gillian shows up on Sally’s doorstep with a dead man in the back seat of her car, and the book shifts from “sisters who grew apart” into something stranger and darker, and honestly this is where Hoffman’s better instincts kick in. The dead man is Gillian’s abusive boyfriend Jimmy, and what the sisters do with his body, and what that body does back to them over the following chapters, is the best sustained stretch of the novel. It’s gothic without being showy about it. It’s also, structurally, kind of a mess, because the book was clearly more interested in mood than plot mechanics, and it shows.

What actually works, and what I think people are being generous about

Look, the prose is the whole show here, and when it lands it really lands. Hoffman writes domestic detail like it’s incantation: black cake, chamomile tea for a broken heart, jars of lavender lining a windowsill. There’s a running motif about how the Owens women can’t fall in love without disaster following, and instead of explaining the curse to death, Hoffman just lets it sit there as atmosphere, the way real families carry unspoken rules nobody questions. The chapter where Sally’s daughters, Kylie and Antonia, are trying to figure out if they’ve inherited “the family aptitude” while also just being ordinary teenage girls worried about bras and boys, that’s some of the best writing in the book. It’s funny and sad in the same sentence, which is a hard trick.

Now here’s the thing I have to be honest about: the back half sags. Once the detective Gary Hallet shows up investigating Jimmy’s disappearance, the book seems to lose interest in its own mystery. It’s resolved almost as an afterthought, not because Hoffman builds to a satisfying reveal but because the plot needs somewhere to go and this is the door available. I remember reading that stretch on my couch on a rainy Sunday, genuinely irritated, flipping pages faster not because I was gripped but because I wanted to get back to the aunts, who are more interesting than every plot point involving them. That’s a real structural problem, not a nitpick.

And I’ll say the quiet part: this book gets called a “witchy classic” so often that I wonder if some of that reputation is really about the 1998 movie, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, the black cat, that whole aesthetic, more than the actual text. The novel is quieter and stranger and sadder than the film, less fun, more melancholy. If you came to the book because you loved the movie, you might be surprised how little midnight margarita energy is actually on the page. I say this as someone who loves both. I just don’t think they’re doing the same thing, and I don’t think the book is quite the tight, magical romp its reputation suggests.

This isn’t a book about witches. It’s a book about what women inherit whether they want to or not: grief, love, other people’s mistakes, and a garden that keeps growing back no matter how many times you try to pave over it.

About Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman has been quietly doing this exact thing, the domestic and the supernatural stitched together so seamlessly you stop noticing the seams, since the 1970s, long before “magical realism” and “cozy fantasy” were shelf labels booksellers slapped on things. She’s written more than thirty novels, survived breast cancer and wrote about it with the same unflinching tenderness she gives her fictional women, and has said in interviews that she thinks of magic as just another word for the parts of life we can’t explain, grief, love, coincidence. She’s not chasing trends. If anything the trends eventually caught up to her.

If the Owens women got under your skin, read these next

“The Ocean at the End of the Lane” by Neil Gaiman, for that same feeling of childhood memory shading into something ancient and unsettling. “Garden Spells” by Sarah Addison Allen, if you want the cozier, gentler cousin of this book, less melancholy, more comfort food. “The Witch of Blackbird Pond” by Elizabeth George Speare, if you want the historical roots of the same fear: what happens to women a town decides are dangerous. And honestly, go find a used copy of Hoffman’s own “Here on Earth” too, since it shares the same Massachusetts bones and nobody talks about it enough.

For your book club

1. The Owens curse is never fully explained, only implied. Do you think the ambiguity strengthens the book or weakens it?
2. Sally spends the whole book trying to outrun magic and inheritance. Do you think she actually escapes it, or just learns to live inside it differently than her aunts did?
3. Jimmy is dead for most of the novel, and yet he might be the most controlling presence in it. What does Hoffman seem to be saying about how abuse lingers after the relationship ends?
4. The aunts are treated as a package deal for most of the book. Did you feel like you got to know them as individuals, or did they blur together for you?
5. If you’ve seen the movie: which version’s ending do you actually prefer, and what does that say about what you wanted from this story?