Practical Magic

Growing up, I read everything I could get my hands on, the more magical the better. Yet on the weekends I spent with my dad, finding a quiet space to read could be tricky. When I couldn’t read, I gravitated to my second favorite love—the Practical Magic movie. For years, every time I visited my dad, I hid myself away and played my recorded VHS, disappearing into a world of magic and loss and sisterhood.

The story follows Sally and Gillian Owens, descendants of powerful women. Women the town blamed when anything went wrong. Orphaned as children, the sisters move in with their elderly aunts, who soothe neighborhood accusations of witchcraft with brownies for breakfast. Fear of the family curse sends the sisters down very different paths as adults, but when things go wrong, their sisterly bond is the only thing that can save them.

Or at least... that’s what happens in the movie. Having watched the film at least 100 times over the past twenty years, it’s overridden my memory of Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel. I remember Teen Me being shocked at some of the differences between the two, but enough years have passed that I think it’s time to revisit the novel that launched a cult classic. If you’re ready to bask in the spooky season this October, I can think of no better read than Practical Magic. I’ll be picking up a copy to read again, too, and I hope you’ll join me.

For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in their Massachusetts town. Gillian and Sally have endured that fate as well: as children, the sisters were forever outsiders, taunted, talked about, pointed at. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, with their musty house and their exotic concoctions and their crowd of black cats. But all Gillian and Sally wanted was to escape.

One will do so by marrying, the other by running away. But the bonds they share will bring them back—almost as if by magic...