Alice Hoffman is known for her work as a writer, particularly for her novel Practical Magic. Practical Magic was published in 1995 and was later turned into a film in 1998. Hoffman's writing style is characterized by its magical realism, which blends fantastical elements with everyday life. In Practical Magic, Hoffman tells the story of the Owens sisters, Sally and Gillian, who come from a long line of witches. The novel explores themes of love, family, and the power of magic. Hoffman's portrayal of the Owens family is both enchanting and relatable, drawing readers into a world where anything is possible.
I love how Hoffman incorporated little tidbits of witchcraft into her descriptions of things:
Green Angel, a post-apocalyptic fairy tale about loss and love, was published by Scholastic and The Foretelling, a book about an Amazon girl in the Bronze Age, was published by Little Brown. I haven t watched the movie so I can t attest to that, but I saw similar comments enough to say that I d probably recommend the book to someone who hasn t seen the movie yet.
Hoffman's portrayal of the Owens family is both enchanting and relatable, drawing readers into a world where anything is possible. Practical Magic is a story about the complexities of sisterhood and the strength that comes from embracing one's true identity. Through her writing, Hoffman invites readers to believe in the power of love and the magic that exists within all of us.
Writer of practical magic
Date: June 25, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - FinalByline: By Mark Childress;
Lead:
PRACTICAL MAGIC By Alice Hoffman. 244 pp. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $22.95.
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SUBURBIA is where Alice Hoffman goes for a taste of dark magic. There's something about those winding streets lined with identical houses that sets her to imagining witches, magicians, black cats, wicked crows, helpful toads, spells, hexes, presentiments. The people in her latest novel, "Practical Magic," live in a world of incantations and Formica, magic potions and linoleum. They don't have time for lives of quiet desperation -- they're too busy subduing ghosts and trying to figure out how much nightshade it takes to kill a grown man.
"For more than 200 years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town," the story begins. "If a damp spring arrived, if cows in the pasture gave milk that was runny with blood, if a colt died of colic or a baby was born with a red birthmark stamped onto his cheek, everyone believed that fate must have been twisted, at least a little, by those women over on Magnolia Street."
The two girls staring from the attic window of the big, spooky house on Magnolia Street are the youngest Owens sisters, Sally and Gillian, just 13 months apart in age but so different from each other that their aunts, who are raising these orphans, call them "Night and Day." Gillian is fair and blond, while Sally's hair is "as black as the pelts of the ill-mannered cats the aunts allowed to skulk through the garden and claw at the draperies in the parlor." The Massachusetts town where Sally and Gillian live with their elderly aunts is never named. My guess is it's not far from Salem.
The girls soon learn what it means to be raised by a couple of witches. The kids in school chase them and hiss and throw apples and stones, which always land at their feet. Sally's reputation is ruined when the aunts' passel of mangy black cats follows her to school and invades the classroom: "A panic had spread and the more high-strung of Sally's classmates were already whispering witchery. . . . Several children had fainted; some would be phobic about cats for the rest of their lives."
But the aunts' specialty is something trickier than ill-mannered cats; these little old ladies in black are actually the witch doctors of love. At twilight, the women of the town steal up to their kitchen door, seeking potions with which to repair troubled romances. Sometimes the charms work, but sometimes a woman wants too much from love and the magic enslaves her. The youngsters eavesdrop from behind a door. "On evenings when the orange moon was rising in the sky, and some woman was crying in their kitchen," Ms. Hoffman writes, "Sally and Gillian would lock pinkies and vow never to be ruled by their passions." Of course, this is a vow designed to be broken. In Ms. Hoffman's fiction, passion is what gets you in trouble -- but it is also what gives life its sweetness, and it can never be denied.
In her teens, Gillian becomes a great beauty: "Boys looked at her and got so dizzy they had to be rushed to the emergency room for a hit of oxygen or a pint of new blood." She's a bit too popular for her own good. Sally turns out to have quieter attractions; she's serious and practical, somewhat grim. It's mainly through her eyes that the sisters' adult lives unfold in four novella-length sections entitled "Superstition," "Premonitions," "Clairvoyance" and "Levitation."
Gillian runs away first, as we know she will from the moment we meet her. She stays gone for years. Sally falls in love right near home, gets married, has two daughters and soon finds herself a young widow. (The aunts predicted it; they heard the ticking of the deathwatch beetle.) When a new generation of kids begins to ostracize her children, Sally's had enough. She heads off for Long Island to raise her girls far away from black cats and spells.
As in her novel "Seventh Heaven," the author creates a central scene in which a young woman heads for the suburbs in search of order and normality. In that earlier novel, she was fleeing a lousy marriage. In "Practical Magic," it's this character's sister who's unlucky in love. For herself, Sally is just looking for "a town where no one pointed when her daughters walked down the street." It's no surprise, then, that after some portentous gusts of wind under dark and stormy skies, Gillian arrives on Sally's doorstep. In the trunk of her car is the corpse of her handsome drug-dealer boyfriend. "It was an accident," she confesses. "More or less."
There's nothing else to do but plant the body in the garden, under the lilacs -- and that's when the trouble begins. After years apart, the sisters are once again in complicity. Ghosts begin walking at night. Garden plants behave strangely. The drug dealer's soul will not rest. The sisters will have to summon up every piece of magic they know.
An added complication comes, of course, in the shape of romance, for Gillian and for Sally. And always in the background is yet another man: Jimmy, the drug dealer, whose ghost all four Owens women can see. "He's sitting up and lighting a cigarette," one of Sally's daughters announces. "He just threw the burning match on the grass." And, sure enough, when her mother checks, she finds that "in the grass there is a spiral of smoke, and the scent of something acrid and burning, as if, indeed, someone had carelessly tossed a match onto the wet lawn. He could burn the house down, if he wanted to."
The tale of the Owenses' struggle is charmingly told, and a good deal of fun. Dark comedy and a light touch carry the story along to a truly Gothic climax, complete with heaving skies and witchery on the lawn. Ms. Hoffman's trademark narrative voice is upbeat, breathless and rather bouncy. She creates vivid characters, she keeps things moving along, and she's not above using sleight of hand and prestidigitation to achieve her considerable effects. She plays tricks with the reader's expectations by suddenly shifting tenses or passing the point of view around the room like a football. At one brief but memorable juncture, we see things through the eyes of a magician's rabbit.
The witches in this novel are not like Anne Rice witches, exactly, nor are they the brujas you meet in "Like Water for Chocolate" or the tales of the Latin American magic realists, despite the echoes you may hear. Alice Hoffman writes about women who have had their witchiness thrust upon them. They have children they love, dinner to get on the table, boyfriends who are bums or magicians or both. When they have problems, they try to solve them with a house in the burbs, a nice yard, regular living. But somehow these time-honored American solutions never seem to work. That's when you need to send for those little old ladies in black.
Toni Morrison calls The Dovekeepers “.. a major contribution to twenty-first century literature” for the past five years. The story of the survivors of Masada is considered by many to be Hoffman’s masterpiece. The New York Times bestselling novel is slated for 2015 miniseries, produced by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, starring Cote de Pablo of NCIS fame.
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Reviews for "Crafting Characters: The Writer's Expertise in Practical Magic"
1. John - 2 stars
I found "Writer of Practical Magic" to be incredibly dull and uninteresting. The characters were flat and lacked depth, and the story lacked any real excitement or intrigue. The writing style was also quite bland and did not captivate my interest. Overall, I was disappointed by this book and would not recommend it to others.
2. Sarah - 1 star
I couldn't even finish "Writer of Practical Magic" because it was so poorly written. The dialogue was stilted and unnatural, making it difficult to connect with the characters. The plot was also slow and lacked any real substance. I struggled to find any redeeming qualities in this book and regretted wasting my time on it.
3. Michael - 2 stars
"Writer of Practical Magic" was a huge letdown for me. The concept seemed intriguing, but unfortunately, the execution fell flat. The pacing was sluggish, and the characters never felt fully developed or relatable. The magic elements in the story were also underwhelming and failed to add any excitement to the plot. I was disappointed by this book and expected more from the author.
4. Emily - 2.5 stars
I had high hopes for "Writer of Practical Magic," but it ultimately fell short. The plot felt disjointed and lacked a clear direction, making it difficult to fully invest in the story. The characters were forgettable, and their motivations seemed forced. While there were a few moments of interesting magic, they were too few and far between to salvage the overall reading experience. I was left feeling underwhelmed and unsatisfied.