Practical Magic

Table of Contents

 

 

“Hoffman’s best ... readers will relish this magical tale.”

—
Publishers Weekly

 

“A sweet, sweet story that like the best fairy tales says more than at first it seems to.”—
New York Daily News

 

“[Hoffman] has proved once again her potency as a storyteller, combining the mundane with the fantastic in a totally engaging way.”—
Boston Sunday Herald

 

“Whimsical ... Hoffman’s touch is so light, her writing so luminous.” —
The Orlando Sentinel

 

“Charming.”—
Library Journal

 

“Witches and ghosts, spells and sleight-of-hand weave a fanciful atmosphere in Alice Hoffman’s tender comedy about clairvoyance, spells, and family ties.”
—The Miami Herald

 

“[A] delicious fantasy of witchcraft and love in a world where gardens smell of lemon verbena and happy endings are possible.”

—
Cosmopolitan

 

“A cosmic romance leavened with just the right touch of pragmatism and humor.”
—Booklist

 

“Hoffman’s writing has plenty of power. Her best sentences are like incantations—they won’t let you get away.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

 

“Perfect.”—
Dayton Daily News

 

“Engaging.”—
Glamour

 

“Whimsical.”—
Los Angeles Times

Praise for the previous works of Alice Hoffman
:

“A page-turner ... hard to put down ... even harder to forget.”

—
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

 

“Investigate[s] the themes of devotion, betrayal, guilt, and forgiveness in trenchantly effective ways.”—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

 

“A delectable writer ... God bless her.”—
New York Daily News

 

“Daringly mixing comedy with tragedy ... [Hoffman] has created a narrative that somehow makes myth out of the sticky complexities of contemporary marriage ... Her characters are branded onto one’s memory.”—
The New York Times Book Review

 

“Flows as swiftly and limpidly as the Haddan River, the town’s mystical waterway ... As ever, Hoffman mixes myth, magic, and reality, addressing issues of town and gown, enchanting her readers with a many-layered morality tale, and proving herself once again an inventive author with a distinctive touch.”—
Publishers
Weekly (starred review)

 

“[Hoffman] plumbs the interior lives of, among others, a drunken recluse, a heartsick teenage boy, an angry daughter, a near madman, a cuckolded husband, and three wounded women with such modesty and skill that she seems to witness rather than invent their lives.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

 

“A good, old-fashioned love story ... Alice Hoffman’s writing at its precise and heartbreaking best.”—
The Washington Post Book World

 

“She is one of the best writers we have today—insightful, funny, intelligent, with a distinctive voice ... [Local Girls] does a lot to show that Hoffman is an established artist at her peak.”

—
The Cleveland Plain Dealer

 

“Suspenseful ... a dark, romantic meditation on what it means to be human.”—
The New Yorker

 

“An unmistakably gifted work ... Alice Hoffman flares with talent.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

 

“Hard to put down ... full of characters who take hold of your heart.”—
The San Francisco Examiner

 

“[An] intimate, lovely novel, most of whose concerns swirl about the pain and joys of motherhood.”—
People

 

 

“Hoffman seems certain to join such writers as Anne Tyler and Mary Gordon ... a major novelist.”—
Newsweek

 

“One of the brightest and most imaginative of contemporary writers.”

—
The Sacramento Bee

 

“Her novels are as fluid and graceful as dreams.”

—
The San Diego Union-Tribune

 

“A reader is in good hands with Alice Hoffman, able to count on many pleasures.”—Jane Smiley,
USA Today

 

“Alice Hoffman is a real writer who pleasures us as she teaches, distracts us from real life as she illuminates it.”—Judith Rossner

 

“With her glorious prose and extraordinary eye ... Alice Hoffman seems to know what it means to be a human being.”

—Susan Isaacs,
Newsday

PROPERTY OF
THE DROWNING SEASON
ANGEL LANDING
WHITE HORSES
FORTUNE’S DAUGHTER
ILLUMINATION NIGHT
AT RISK
SEVENTH HEAVEN
TURTLE MOON
SECOND NATURE
PRACTICAL MAGIC
HERE ON EARTH
LOCAL GIRLS
THE RIVER KING
BLUE DIARY
For Children
FIREFLIES
HORSEFLY
AQUAMARINE
INDIGO

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Pablisbed by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1995 by Alice Hoffman.

 

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

 

eISBN : 978-1-440-67375-7

 

 

Hoffman, Alice.

Practical magic / by Alice Hoffman.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-440-67375-7

1. Title.
PS3558.03447P-47013 CIP
813’.54—dc20

 

 

 

PLEASE VISIT THE AUTHOR’S WEBSITE AT
www.alicehoffman.com

For every evil under the sun,
There is a remedy, or there is none.
If there be one, seek till you find it;
If there be none, never mind it.

 

MOTHER GOOSE

SUPERSTITION

FOR more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town. 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. It didn’t matter what the problem was—lightning, or locusts, or a death by drowning. It didn’t matter if the situation could be explained by logic, or science, or plain bad luck. As soon as there was a hint of trouble or the slightest misfortune, people began pointing their fingers and placing blame. Before long they’d convinced themselves that it wasn’t safe to walk past the Owens house after dark, and only the most foolish neighbors would dare to peer over the black wrought-iron fence that circled the yard like a snake.

Inside the house there were no clocks and no mirrors and three locks on each and every door. Mice lived under the floorboards and in the walls and often could be found in the dresser drawers, where they ate the embroidered tablecloths, as well as the lacy edges of the linen placemats. Fifteen different sorts of wood had been used for the window seats and the mantels, including golden oak, silver ash, and a peculiarly fragrant cherrywood that gave off the scent of ripe fruit even in the dead of winter, when every tree outside was nothing more than a leafless black stick. No matter how dusty the rest of the house might be, none of the woodwork ever needed polishing. If you squinted, you could see your reflection right there in the wainscoting in the dining room or the banister you held on to as you ran up the stairs. It was dark in every room, even at noon, and cool all through the heat of July. Anyone who dared to stand on the porch, where the ivy grew wild, could try for hours to look through the windows and never see a thing. It was the same looking out; the green-tinted window glass was so old and so thick that everything on the other side seemed like a dream, including the sky and the trees.

The little girls who lived up in the attic were sisters, only thirteen months apart in age. They were never told to go to bed before midnight or reminded to brush their teeth. No one cared if their clothes were wrinkled or if they spit on the street. All the while these little girls were growing up, they were allowed to sleep with their shoes on and draw funny faces on their bedroom walls with black crayons. They could drink cold Dr Peppers for breakfast, if that was what they craved, or eat marshmallow pies for dinner. They could climb onto the roof and sit perched on the slate peak, leaning back as far as possible, in order to spy the first star. There they would stay on windy March nights or humid August evenings, whispering, arguing over whether it was feasible for even the smallest wish to ever come true.

The girls were being raised by their aunts, who, as much as they might have wanted to, simply couldn’t turn their nieces away. The children, after all, were orphans whose careless parents were so much in love they failed to notice smoke emanating from the walls of the bungalow where they’d gone to enjoy a second honeymoon, after leaving the girls home with a baby-sitter. No wonder the sisters always shared a bed during storms; they were both terrified of thunder and could never speak above a whisper once the sky began to rumble. When they did finally doze off, their arms wrapped around each other, they often had the exact same dreams. There were times when they could complete each other’s sentences; certainly each could close her eyes and guess what the other most desired for dessert on any given day.

But in spite of their closeness, the two sisters were entirely different in appearance and temperament. Aside from the beautiful gray eyes the Owens women were known for, no one would have had reason to guess the sisters were related. Gillian was fair and blond, while Sally’s hair was 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. Gillian was lazy and liked to sleep past noon. She saved up her allowance money, then paid Sally to do her math homework and iron her party dresses. She drank bottles of Yoo-Hoo and ate goopy Hershey’s bars while sprawled out on the cool basement floor, content to watch as Sally dusted the metal shelves where the aunts kept pickles and preserves. Gillian’s favorite thing in the world to do was to lie on the velvet-cushioned window seat, up on the landing, where the drapes were made of damask and a portrait of Maria Owens, who had built the house so long ago, collected dust in a corner. That’s where she could be found on summer afternoons, so relaxed and languid that moths would land on her, mistaking her for a cushion, and proceed to make tiny holes in her T-shirts and jeans.