Hello everyone. Welcome to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I’m trying to catch up on my reviews and will be reviewing Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman. Visit the author’s website here. This review has minor spoilers.
Practical Magic is one of those books that I wanted to love, because I watched the movie and loved it so much, but I just couldn’t. This book, unfortunately, was a miss for me. It is one of those rare cases where the movie is so much better than the book. Maybe it was that I couldn’t help comparing the protagonists in this book to their counterparts in the movie, but, oh my God, I couldn’t stand Sally. Gillian is no better, in my opinion and Sally’s daughters, Antonia and Kylie, are just not my favorite of the bunch.
This book is the complete opposite of The Rules of Magic (Read my review here). This prequel to Practical Magic, of which there are two, is all about finding out who you are, accepting who you are, and loving yourself for it. While Franny, Jet, and Vincent fight their mother and rebel against the normal life she wants for them, everything that Sally wants is to be normal, and she denies who she is and lies to herself in order to achieve that sense of normalcy. While Franny, Jet, and Vincent find themselves in Magnolia Street, both Sally and Gillian run from it, and want to be someone they are not.
I didn’t like Sally or Gillian. And I think that this book would have been so much better if the author had explained with greater depth why both sisters wanted to be normal; it didn’t help that the book was so short. In less than 300 pages it tries to tell how both Sally and Gillian grow up in Massachusetts, escape from their painful childhood memories (and their aunts), lose love, or run away from it wanting to escape the curse (which ultimately Gillian does not do because Jimmy dies and it was the curse that kills him, not Gillian), finding love again (both of them) and setting up the stage for Kylie’s and Antonia’s own stories. And mixed up in all of that, there’s Gary trying to find out who killed Jimmy. It all felt so rushed that there was no time (or space) for any of the main characters (Sally, Gillian, Antonia, and Kylie) to develop. I get, for example, why Sally was the way she was; the sister that always thought things through and kept them together when their parents died. But I think that her personality and the reason why she was adamant in not being reckless and carefree wasn’t explored with as much depth as it could have been and eventually her personality became rather grating and insufferable.
“There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.”
Gillian was no better. I recently watched the movie again and wondered, by the end of it, why Gillian doesn’t get her happy ending like Sally does. The movie focuses a lot on Sally and Gary getting together whilst the curse is mysteriously lifted when they kiss at the end. But in the book, Gillian gets together with Ben Frye (who doesn’t even show up in the movie) and has a lot of sex with him even before Gary is introduced in the last quarter of the book. And frankly, Gillian and Ben bored me. There are pages and pages of the two of them having sex and I was a bit annoyed that so many pages were dedicated to this when they could have been used for something else that would’ve helped me connect with Gillian and like her more. Her having sex was definitely not it.
I get that the connection between them was somehow ‘magical’, and that they couldn’t get their hands off of each other, but I was just not into their relationship at all. He sees her one second and then wants to marry her the next. This is insta-love; there’s nothing magical about it, and I do not like insta-love. Plus, Ben was just so plain and cardboard-like I couldn’t find it in me to root for him and Gillian. Same thing happens with Sally and Gary. They see each other, and then they’re in love, all in the same sentence. It was very disappointing because I liked Sally and Gary in the movie. But there is no angst and emotion, and I felt myself seriously detached from it all and bored. Sadly.
I was also disappointed that the aunts barely show up in the book. Both Sally and Gillian clearly have some issues to solve with them, and I thought that solving those issues would be instrumental in helping Sally and Gillian figure out who they are and accept themselves, but whatever issues those were they were addressed in a couple of paragraphs before they “took care of the problem in the garden” in the last three or four pages of the book. After that, Sally finally admits that she’s been lying to herself all this time and that now she isn’t going to do that anymore. She is going to embrace who she is. Gillian also changes. She isn’t the woman that runs away anymore; now she will stick around and face her problems head on. Frankly, I was very disillusioned at how the book ended (not that I was expecting any better) and admit that I rolled my eyes at Sally and Gillian here.
I gave this book an I Did Not Like It rating.
