Practical Magic - Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic #1)

One of the Book of the Month selections last fall was The Rules of Magic, the recently-released prequel to Hoffman's classic Practical Magic, which has also been adapted to the screen in a version featuring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as the main characters.  I've seen the movie, and liked it quite a bit, and the prequel intrigued me--but I felt like to be on the same page, I should read the original first.

To those who've seen the movie: the book is very different.  But I think they are equally good, in different ways.  The book has less of a focus on the trouble brought on by the vile Jimmy and more of a focus on the relationships between the two sisters, the growing-up of Sally's daughters, and the powerful ways in which love affects all of their lives.  Jimmy and the trouble he brings are still present, but they don't provide the same central propulsion that they do in the movie.  Additionally, while the movie takes place on the island in Massachusetts, the setting moves away from there after the first part of this book, instead being set mostly in a small community in New York where no one has ever heard of the Owenses and never thinks they might be witches, which in itself lends a very different atmosphere to the story.

This book definitely falls into the magical realism category.  Fantastic things happen and are treated as just everyday happenstance, not just by Sally and Gillian and their family but by others around them.  The Owenses might be the source of the magic, but it's not strange in and of itself.  Magical realism tends to have a definite writing style associated with it; not a ton of dialogue, but a lot of prose narrative relating what's happening, probably because the characters commenting too much on the magical events would contribute to breaking the spell, as it were.  That said, the characters still feel real and complete and the events of the book, while of course strange and unreal, still seem to ring true.

The focus of the book here is on the relationships between the characters, with the Jimmy subplot being just that.  The sisters, the aunts, Sally's daughters--the ties between all of them are stretched and warped and torn, and the story here is both that separation and bringing them back together, with a few extra folks thrown in for good measure.  Luckily, this is a definite strength of the book.  Hoffman shows that you can absolutely hate someone for what they've done or what they've pulled you into, but love them and want to help them at the same time.  Additionally, part of the "relationship" aspect of this is Sally and Gillian's relationships with themselves.  Both ultimately fled Massachusetts and the aunts, leaving their whacky childhoods and accusations of witchcraft behind, but are forced to come back to their heritage and embrace it in order to solve the problems that rear their ugly heads.  The climax isn't very climactic in a movie sort of way--there's no possession, no calling of the phone tree, etc.--but is extremely climactic in how you can see Sally and Gillian change.  It might not look monumental, but it certainly feels so.

It's a slow story, a lot of wandering rather than racing, backtracking and then jumping back to the present.  Some people feel like they should have been included more than they were--like Gary!  Where the heck was all of his page time?  Ben got so much in comparison, and even the teenage love interests got more.  But overall, it still felt, well, magical, and I really enjoyed reading it.

4 stars out of 5.

The Museum of Extraordinary Things - Alice Hoffman

For Coralie, the extraordinary is everyday.  Her father owns and runs the Museum of Extraordinary Things, a small exhibit on Coney Island that some would term a "freak show," featuring people with various kinds of abnormalities, including Coralie herself.  Born with webbed fingers, she performs as a mermaid in her father's exhibit, along with a "wolf man," a "butterfly girl," and various other oddities.  Coralie is kept on a tight leash, and she dreams of knowing more about the world, a desire that is only further fueled when she glimpses a young man in the woods one night while she's pretending to be a river monster on her father's orders.

Eddie (born Ezekiel) Cohen is a photographer scraping by in New York City with his trusty pit bull Mitts.  As a child, he worked first in garment factories with his father, and then as a sort of child investigator, which played on a knack he has for finding things.  Following the terrible Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which Eddie photographed, a man approaches him asking Eddie to help find his daughter, who has been missing since the day of the inferno but who doesn't appear to have been a victim of  the flames.  This request sets Eddie and Coralie on a collision course, built on the strings of wonder and obsession as Coralie tests the boundaries her father has set and Eddie tries to solve the mystery of Hannah Weiss.

The writing in this varies between tell-y and absolutely beautiful, and part of that is due to the way the narrative is set up.  The chapters alternate between Coralie and Eddie.  Each chapter begins with a long section of italicized, first-person narration before switching to another section of third-person narration.  Switching the perspectives has the dual effect of being cool (it allows us to see into the main characters' minds more easily, while still moving the plot along at a pace that can be hard to accomplish in first-person) and jarring, because the transitions are so abrupt and obvious.  But Coralie's sections in particular can be lovely, because she has this strange flipped sense of the extraordinary; to her, the strange is commonplace and everyday things, like the other parks of Coney Island (especially Dreamland) are reasons for wonder, which makes common settings and events seem wondrous to the reader, as well.  Additionally, one of the climactic scenes (there are two: one regarding the Hannah Weiss plot and one regarding Coralie) seemed to fall flat, like Hoffman was in such a hurry to get on to the bigger scene that followed that she just glossed over what could have easily been an utterly spine-chilling event.  Another minor plot, dealing with Eddie and his father, didn't seem fully wrapped-up to me, but possibly others were satisfied with how that went.

There are also other parts of this book I would have been happier without knowing about, and I don't see that they were intrinsic to the plot.  The one that comes most to mind is the Dreamland fire.  I can see where Hoffman was going, framing the main narrative with two huge fires in New York, but at the same time, the Dreamland fire bothered me so much (spoiler: animals die, guys) that I really wished it hadn't been included, especially as it didn't seem terribly important to the plot.  It made everything very dramatic, I suppose, and I can see where the fire might also have been used as some sort of symbolism for the destruction of Coralie's former life or something like that, but I also felt like the same affect could have been achieved without a slaughterfest of innocent, loyal animals.  That one was a major downer for me and definitely tainted the rest of the ending.

Overall, though, I think this was a wonderful book.  It's a very different aspect of historical fiction, one that we don't see very often (though it does bear similarities to Palisades Park in some ways), and I enjoyed that.  The character of the time and place really come through in addition to the actual, living characters on the page.  The supporting cast was well fleshed out, instead of seeming like paper cutouts of people there only to support Coralie and Eddie.  I'd probably read this one again, despite the aspects of it I disliked; the pros outweighed the cons by a good deal here.

4 out of 5 stars.