Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. In this post, I will be doing a wrap up of all the books I read in October 2021. This month I read Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic series in addition to a couple more books that I really enjoyed. These reviews have minor spoilers.
1. The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffmann
This book is the first of two prequels to Alice Hoffmann’s bestseller novel Practical Magic, first published in 1995. I read this book for the first time in January 2021, and I admit that I liked it more the second time around. It was a joy to return to New York and Massachusetts in the early 1960s and read about how Frances, Jet, and Vincent learn to love themselves and others. All three siblings fall in love, and most of the book is about how they have to outsmart the curse their family suffers from so that they don’t lose the one they love. Of all three of them, Jet is the least fortunate and it is she who experiences the most soul-wrenching form of loss, even though Frances and Vincent also suffer and lose a lot. I really liked Aunt Isabel, and Frances’ relationship with Haylin was one of the best things of the book. Jet’s relationship with Levi however, though sweet, was rather fleeting and forgettable. I would have liked Levi’s personality to have shown through the pages a little bit more before he was killed off, but that didn’t happen, and I found that I wasn’t rooting for him and Jet as much as I was for Frances and Haylin. The same thing happened to me with Vincent and William. Though I am glad that Vincent found love, his storyline was the one I liked least of all three of them. I gave this book an I Really Liked It rating.
2. The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt
This book was a surprising read for me this month, and it quickly became a new favorite. This is the story of how an unemployed papal secretary, but avid book hunter discovered a copy of Lucretius’s On The Nature Of Things in a remote monastery in southern Germany, and how this astonishing discovery caused a “swerve”—an unexpected, unpredictable movement of matter—that prevented the poem and its philosophy to fall into oblivion, the trajectory it was headed into before it was discovered and allowed it to transform the world into what we know today as modernity. This book touches upon the importance of Greek thinkers and philosophies and how their words shaped the world. Unfortunately most of those writings are lost today and what we do know about and have readily available is not even a quarter of what was written back then. I gave this book a New Favorite rating.
3. Practical Magic by Alice Hoffmann
This book was a disappointment for me, and I gave it an I Did Not Like It rating. Maybe I was expecting to like it as much as the movie, and I was disappointed that it did not deliver. I don’t know. I do know that it was not what I was hoping for, and I did not enjoy it at all. The whole story felt rushed and both Sally and Gillian were insufferable. I hated their personalities and did not care for either one of them at all. I understand that in this book, as in The Rules of Magic, the most important relationship is that between the siblings; in this case, Sally and Gillian, but their respective romantic relationships were utterly disappointing, and I couldn’t find it in me to root for any of them. The ending too felt too rushed; it felt like an afterthought and it annoyed me how both Sally and Gillian changed in three or four pages at the end of the book and learned to accept who they were when they were insufferable (I know I said this already, but it really annoyed me) for most of the book. Yeah, this book was definitely a no for me. Too bad because the cover is gorgeous.
4. She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan
To be honest, I read this book because of the hype, and I was very happy I did. I liked it very much. The main character is one of those protagonists that just shines. Told from a very young age that she will be nothing, become nothing, and die as nothing, the last living daughter of the Zhu family refuses to be nothing and fights with everything she has to change the fate she has been allotted. It is her brother Zhu Chongba, the only one of the last two surviving Zhu children and the one of them that has a name, who will become great. But it is him that dies of despair when some bandits orphans them, and it is the nameless daughter, desperate to save herself from certain death, who takes her dead brother’s identity and claims his abandoned greatness.
I did not expect to like this book as much as I did. Frankly, I thought it was going to be a repeat of The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang but I was surprisingly proved wrong. I actually liked the main character in this one, and I enjoyed his/her/their journey to becoming the warlord he/she/they (I don’t know what pronoun he/she/they would prefer) become at the end of the book. This book was everything I wanted The Poppy War to be, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I will definitely continue on with this series when the next book comes out. Parenthesis. The Poppy War is a very good book, and in saying that She Who Became The Sun is what I had expected The Poppy War to be I do not want to lessen R.F. Kuang’s work, but this is what I experienced while reading this book and this review is based on this experience and my opinion regarding it. End of parenthesis.
5. Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffmann
This is the second prequel to Practical Magic by Alice Hoffmann, and I enjoyed this one very much as well. This is the story of Maria Owens, the matriarch of the Owens family, and how she placed a curse on herself and her descendants after she was abandoned by the father of her child and the man whom she thought was the love of her life. It also a story of love and loss and I really liked how all kinds of love—self-love, romantic love, and our love for a child—are intrinsically linked. I also loved Samuel and Maria. Chronologically speaking, this is the book that should be read first and then The Rules of Magic, however I read this prequel in order of publication (The Rules of Magic was published first and Magic Lessons second) and found that this allowed me to remember a lot of little details that the author mentions again in the last book of the series. I gave this book an I Really Liked It rating.
6. The Book of Magic by Alice Hoffmann
This book was released in October 2021, and it is the last book in Alice Hoffmann’s Practical Magic series. It is the story of how the Owens family break Maria’s curse when Kylie turns to left-handed magic trying to save her boyfriend after he is in a car accident and is put into a medically induced coma. In this book, we see old characters again and learn what has become of them while at the same time we meet new characters that will ultimately be just as important in the end. Jet, for example, dies early in the book (this is not a spoiler, it’s in the blurb) but we learn that Levi was not the love of her life as we thought earlier. It was Rafael, the man who saved her from herself when she wanted to kill herself at the hotel and I found myself wishing that the author had dedicated more pages to their love story. Sally, a bitter woman who has lost two husbands (yes, Gary dies) to the curse finally meets her match in this book. I actually liked her in this one (shocking, I know. Though I didn’t like her all that much at the beginning of the book). Vincent comes back from Paris and finds love again (after William dies) while Gillian wishes she could be pregnant as her niece Antonia is. We also see Hannah (from the old Essex County) and Maria, and I enjoyed those glimpses of the past. All in all, this was fitting end to the series. I gave this book an I Really Liked It rating. I will probably read these book again. Maybe I’ll like Practical Magic better next time. Who knows?
That is everything I read in October. Thank you for visiting my blog.
