The Owens children cannot escape love even if they try, just as they cannot escape the pains of the human heart. Back in New York City each begins a risky journey as they try to escape the family curse. But when her children visit their Aunt Isabelle, in the small Massachusetts town where the Owens family has been blamed for everything that has ever gone wrong, they uncover family secrets and begin to understand the truth of who they are. And most importantly, never, ever, fall in love. Difficult Franny, with skin as pale as milk and blood red hair, shy and beautiful Jet, who can read other people’s thoughts, and charismatic Vincent, who began looking for trouble on the day he could walk.įrom the start Susanna sets down rules for her children: No walking in the moonlight, no red shoes, no wearing black, no cats, no crows, no candles, no books about magic. Hundreds of years later, in New York City at the cusp of the sixties, when the whole world is about to change, Susanna Owens knows that her three children are dangerously unique. The Rules of Magic shows that sometimes the work you do comes back to you threefold - and sometimes you go back to the work you've done, and unfold three times more color from it.From beloved author Alice Hoffman comes the spellbinding prequel to her bestseller, Practical Magic.įor the Owens family, love is a curse that began in 1620, when Maria Owens was charged with witchery for loving the wrong man. Hoffman's prose is as tender, dreamy and sweet as ever, laced with the sting of vinegar and broken glass.

But overall, the tug of the familiar and the enchantment of the new are the rule to which the above were exceptions. Trying to puzzle a consistency out of the magic use was a bit like trying to bottle up the river with a sieve, so for the most part I shrugged it off and just lay back into the current. I was sometimes confused by how often do no harm came up as an exhortation or a plot point, when by any conceivable metric the Owens siblings do harm people - and themselves - with magic all the time. I wanted to hold these characters' hands. I kept reading, not because I wanted to reach the end, but because I wanted to dwell in the honey-light of Hoffman's words. reading it was like being caught in a current, floating along with a river's twists and turns, glimpsing familiarity and difference in varied measure before tumbling into something like the sea.

The rules of magic hoffman