From my TBR pile and given to me as a birthday present. The edition I read was published by Random House.

I watched this film not long after it came out in 1998 and is one of the few films that I've ever considered reading the original book it was based on, and 15 or so years later, I did! The book and the film are definitely different, but the overall story of the film remains true to the book and actually plays to the strengths of the 4 main adult actresses: Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Stockard Channing, Diane Wiest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZf-HiXQXnE



Gillian being the beautiful but wild one, who can never be tied down and is breaking hearts long before she runs away from her aunts and her sister.

Sally is the older, more sensible one, practical, vegetarian, science based one who soon rejects anything that cant be proved with evidence. Her aunts, being the local witches, are shunned by most during the day, but have their advice sought as soon as dusk makes their visitors' identity hidden.

The book is split up into four chapters, each covering a specific part of the girls' life.

Superstition is about the girls growing up with the aunts, and learning the price of your heart's desire. It finishes with Gillian already having escaped, and Sally moving away with her daughters Antonia and Kylie (the first set of differences with the film, where Sally never moves away and Antonia and Kylie have a much smaller part).

Premonitions is where Gillian finds Sally and the girls (who are now teenagers) in their house, and brings trouble in the form of the dead body of Gillian's boyfriend Jimmy. Sally is the one person Gillian can talk to – she is scared of the Aunts and doesnt feel she has the right or the want to ask for their help.

Clairvoyance is where Gillian settles in, finds new beau, but things turn for the worse including Jimmy haunting the garden. The lilac tree – under which Jimmy is buried – seems to grow amazingly, attracting weeping love lorn women, until the tree is cut down and burnt. Kylie and Antonia have a much bigger part than what is presented in the film – Antonia is similar to Gillian in the heart breaking skills, and Kylie – tall, ungainly, and sharing a room with her aunt – is soon influenced by Gillian's behaviour, until she feels betrayed by not being the centre of Gillian's world.

Levitation finds Gary seeking Jimmy whose malevolent energy continues to haunt the garden. The girls realise they have to call the aunts in to help and turn up the older women do, in their own style of course. The tables have definitely turned on Sally and Gillian. Gillian has finally found someone she wants to fight for and who is probably worth stability and staying put.She also realises that perhaps she is worth what the Aunts are prepared to bring. Sally has had the stability, and found that denying her past and her skills has brought her very little joy. The presence of Gary in her life – even briefly – makes her wonder whether the perceived stability is worth not having him in her life.

Gary makes a very short appearance in the book - but Aidan Quinn is a large part of the movie. In the book Jimmy turns up already dead, but Goran Visnjic has a much bigger part as the threatening ghost of Jimmy - in no small nod to his status as "taking over from George Clooney as the ER hunk" status - no complaints from me on either point!.

The story is told very much in the “epic third person” where it's a rather lyrical, sweeping, portions of time being swept away – there is very little dialogue between characters and whole decades disappear in a blink of an eye.

So: I love both the film AND the book, which is quite rare for me. Whilst the film is different from the book, there's at least enough of the spirit of the book kept within it (helped by Hoffman being one of the scriptwriters) to make me satisfied.

From my TBR pile and given to me as a birthday present. The edition I read was published by Random House.

I watched this film not long after it came out in 1998 and is one of the few films that I've ever considered reading the original book it was based on, and 15 or so years later, I did! The book and the film are definitely different, but the overall story of the film remains true to the book and actually plays to the strengths of the 4 main adult actresses: Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Stockard Channing, Diane Wiest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZf-HiXQXnE



Gillian being the beautiful but wild one, who can never be tied down and is breaking hearts long before she runs away from her aunts and her sister.

Sally is the older, more sensible one, practical, vegetarian, science based one who soon rejects anything that cant be proved with evidence. Her aunts, being the local witches, are shunned by most during the day, but have their advice sought as soon as dusk makes their visitors' identity hidden.

The book is split up into four chapters, each covering a specific part of the girls' life.

Superstition is about the girls growing up with the aunts, and learning the price of your heart's desire. It finishes with Gillian already having escaped, and Sally moving away with her daughters Antonia and Kylie (the first set of differences with the film, where Sally never moves away and Antonia and Kylie have a much smaller part).

Premonitions is where Gillian finds Sally and the girls (who are now teenagers) in their house, and brings trouble in the form of the dead body of Gillian's boyfriend Jimmy. Sally is the one person Gillian can talk to – she is scared of the Aunts and doesnt feel she has the right or the want to ask for their help.

Clairvoyance is where Gillian settles in, finds new beau, but things turn for the worse including Jimmy haunting the garden. The lilac tree – under which Jimmy is buried – seems to grow amazingly, attracting weeping love lorn women, until the tree is cut down and burnt. Kylie and Antonia have a much bigger part than what is presented in the film – Antonia is similar to Gillian in the heart breaking skills, and Kylie – tall, ungainly, and sharing a room with her aunt – is soon influenced by Gillian's behaviour, until she feels betrayed by not being the centre of Gillian's world.

Levitation finds Gary seeking Jimmy whose malevolent energy continues to haunt the garden. The girls realise they have to call the aunts in to help and turn up the older women do, in their own style of course. The tables have definitely turned on Sally and Gillian. Gillian has finally found someone she wants to fight for and who is probably worth stability and staying put.She also realises that perhaps she is worth what the Aunts are prepared to bring. Sally has had the stability, and found that denying her past and her skills has brought her very little joy. The presence of Gary in her life – even briefly – makes her wonder whether the perceived stability is worth not having him in her life.

Gary makes a very short appearance in the book - but Aidan Quinn is a large part of the movie. In the book Jimmy turns up already dead, but Goran Visnjic has a much bigger part as the threatening ghost of Jimmy - in no small nod to his status as "taking over from George Clooney as the ER hunk" status - no complaints from me on either point!.

The story is told very much in the “epic third person” where it's a rather lyrical, sweeping, portions of time being swept away – there is very little dialogue between characters and whole decades disappear in a blink of an eye.

So: I love both the film AND the book, which is quite rare for me. Whilst the film is different from the book, there's at least enough of the spirit of the book kept within it (helped by Hoffman being one of the scriptwriters) to make me satisfied.

4.25 stars
This wasn't what I expected, I can't decide if it's better or worse. ( )

Two sisters -- cautious Sally and carefree Gillian -- are raised by their aunts before growing up and moving away. Sally gets married and has two daughters of her own while Gillian wanders from state to state and man to man. Things come to a head when Gillian arrives at Sally's doorstep with a corpse in her car. Can the sisters solve things on their own or do they need to call in the aunts?

I'm SO glad that I chose to read this series in the order of the family's chronology instead of the order that they were written. I guess it makes sense that as a younger author, Hoffman wasn't at the top of her game yet. This book is by no means bad, but it's not up to par with the first two I read in this series. For starters, I really didn't like Gillian or Antonia (Sally's older daughter) nor did I particularly care for Sally either. Kylie had some potential, but as Sally's younger daughter only at the age of 13 by the end of the novel, her story is given the least amount of treatment. The aunts -- referred to as such, as though they are a singular unit, for 90% of the book -- are unrecognizable as the Franny and Jet characters that I came to love in the previous title. Their backstory here (as well as that of their ancestor, Maria Owens) differs from the backstories they all got in the previous two books and that bothered me. And, despite magic being in the title, this book has the least magic of all the series thus far. It's almost an afterthought among the various plotlines and potential romantic relationships being tossed about instead.

That all being said, I've read three-quarters of this series already so I intend to move on to the final book and see it how that goes. ( )

{third in Practical Magic series, first written in series; magical realism, urban fantasy}(1995)

This looks like it was the first written in the series but third in chronology in the Practical Magic series.

Sally and Gillian Owens, who come from a long line of daughters who always take the surname ‘Owens’, were orphaned early and taken in by ‘the aunts’ - another pair of Owens sisters (whose true loves were struck by lightning and so they’ve been spinsters ever since) with a mysterious air about them. The girls, when they grow up, do their best to avoid their magic heritage especially as it has resulted in them being shunned at school and in their New England town with whispers of witchcraft. They have grown up feeling that they don’t quite belong and they don’t deserve love; especially as Owens girls have historically been unlucky in love - or at least not quite lucky.

Gillian, always less responsible than Sally, runs away from home as soon as she can while Sally has a family of her own and doesn’t want to see history repeat itself when her daughters grow up. But finally Gillian brings her troubles home to Sally and the sisters’ lives evolve.

To be honest, urban fantasy is not my preferred genre. Though the Owens girls do have flaws to their characters (so at least they’re not too good to be true) they are all stunningly beautiful and all the boys around them fall excessively in love with them all - which is a bit annoying for us ordinary mortals. Even down-to-Earth Sally, around whose life the story is based, gets someone to fall in love with her when he reads a letter she’s written to her sister.

I found this a fairly gentle story although the premonitions and foreshadowing had me skipping ahead nervously once or twice and the switches in tense between the present and the past for the same time frame was a bit confusing. I did appreciate the bond between sisters (and also the three different generations); however annoying they find each other - or just don’t fully comprehend each other - they are there for their family in times of trouble. I wouldn’t mind seeing the film based on this book.

I like the last half-paragraph of the book:

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.

And, for all its doomsaying, the story does end happily.

3.5 stars ( )