But Vincent, so charismatic even as a newborn that a nurse tried to spirit him out of the hospital hidden inside her coat, is not yet a teenager before he’s south of 14th Street, strumming his guitar on street corners in Greenwich Village as the 1960s dawn. The Owens sisters had a baby brother! The only male Owens in centuries was the third child of Susanna, an Owens who skedaddled out of Massachusetts as soon as she could, desperate to remove herself from the stigma clinging to her family name.įirstborn Franny, pale as porcelain, with “blood-red” hair and “an ability to commune with birds,” mostly abides by those rules, as does the shy beauty, Jet, whose knack for reading people’s thoughts allows her to skirt a lot of missteps. Hoffman has now returned to fill out their portraits, providing a back story that thoroughly upends what we thought we knew about them.
Readers don’t even know their names - Frances, called Franny, and Bridget, known as Jet - until late in that novel’s last act. People who know only the film version may be surprised to learn that “the aunts,” as Sally and Gillian refer to their guardians, are thinly sketched characters for most of “Practical Magic.” Though they’re described as part of a long line of beautiful Owens women with gray eyes and an intrinsic understanding of how plants (and animal organs) can cure various ailments (principally lovesickness), most of what readers learn about the older sisters borders on witchy caricature: They’re peculiar and reclusive, with long white hair and crooked spines. Since her first, “Property Of,” published in 1977 when she was 25, Hoffman has averaged a book a year - more than 30 novels, three collections of short fiction and eight books for children and young adults.īut Hoffman’s latest offering, “The Rules of Magic,” is likely to attract particular attention because it’s a prequel to her 1995 novel, “Practical Magic,” perhaps the best-known work of her career and the basis for the 1998 film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as the sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, born into a Massachusetts family whose founding matriarch escaped Salem’s gallows by magicking herself out of her noose. Novels flow from Alice Hoffman with the reliability of leaves falling in autumn. THE RULES OF MAGIC By Alice Hoffman 367 pp.
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