Hello everyone. Welcome to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I’m reviewing The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman. Visit the author’s website here. The Rules of Magic is one of two prequels to this author’s very famous novel Practical Magic first published in 1995. This review has spoilers.
The Rules of Magic are:
Do as you will, but harm no one.
What you give will be returned to you threefold.
Fall in love whenever you can.
But Franny, Jet, and Vincent have to follow another set of rules: No walking in the moonlight, no Ouija boards, no candles, no red shoes, no wearing black, no going shoeless, no amulets, no night-blooming flowers, no reading novels about magic, no cats, no crows, and no venturing below Fourteenth Street. Of course, they do all of these things.
From a very young age, Franny, Jet, and Vincent—the only boy to be born in the Owens’ family—knew they were different. They were not like the other kids at school, and they did not fit in the ‘normal’ life their mother Susannah wanted for them. Once, she fell madly in love and eloped to Paris. But just like every other woman in her family before her, she too suffered from the Owens family curse, and the man she loved died. Not wanting her children to suffer the same fate, she refuses to tell them about her family and who they are. But they are witches, and this book is a coming-of-age story in which the three siblings learn to live with the curse and fall in love despite trying their hardest not to.
Even though the main theme of the book is love, both for yourself and others, and how loving yourself is the only way to accept and be yourself, the book also explores issues related to sex, drugs, death, grief, depression, same-sex relationships, and family; issues that every reader has gone through some time in their lives, and this makes it very easy for us to connect with these characters and live through their heartaches and misfortunes along with them.
Know that the only remedy for love is to love more
I liked all three protagonists, but I liked Franny and Jet the most. And particularly, I liked Franny’s story the most. Her relationship with Haylin was the most developed in the book, I think, and the one that I got the most invested in (maybe because I absolutely loved Haylin). But Jet’s story was the most painful, and hers was not just a journey about falling in love but a journey about healing. In losing Levi, she has to heal in order to accept and love herself. All three siblings must learn how to love themselves and accept who they are (along with the curse), but I think that it is in Vincent’s story where we see this more prominently. As the only male witch ever to be born in the Owens family, Vincent doesn’t know who he is despite knowing what he is. He is a wizard, and a powerful one too. But he is lost (and is perhaps the one that is lost the most of all three of them) because he doesn’t know how to find himself despite his powers. So he tries everything. He delves in dark magic, he sleeps around, he drinks a lot, but it is only when he falls in love and learns to accept that he falls in love with a man that he finds himself.
Despite the curse, love is still the greatest power there is. In Jet’s story, she had to learn how to forgive herself for surviving the accident and to forgive her family and the past for being instrumental in Levi’s death; Franny had to learn that love was not something you could deny, and that it is love what makes you understand who you are and accept what you are in the end. And Vincent, once he fell in love with William, understood that love was the key to finding his way and happiness.
This was a re-read for me, and I liked it more this time than before. But I will say that if you’re not used to this author’s writing style, it is a little hard to get used to. The first time I read this book, I had trouble getting used to it and felt that the story was rather ‘told’; a lot of things happen in the background that the author tells us about in a small paragraph or two. Years can go by, characters go away and come back, or something important occurs that affects the characters’ lives (like a character’s death) and yet the author only mentions it in one or two sentences and continues on. I haven’t read a whole lot of this author’s books outside of the Practical Magic series, so I don’t know if she writes like this in all of her books (of which she has plenty) but I eventually did get used to it, and in this book it works because Franny, Jet, and Vincent not only have to try to figure out who they are in this book but grow up in the process. By the end of the book Franny and Jet are now the two aunts we meet in Practical Magic and who take in Sally and Gillian after the death of their parents.
I gave this book an I Really Liked It And Will Probably Read It Again rating.
