THE RULES OF MAGIC (October 2017)
Alice Hoffman
Simon and Shuster,
384 pages
★★★★ ½
When it comes to cultural repetition, sequels get most of
the bad press though, truth be told, prequels are far more likely to be awful.
Do you know anyone who prefers any of the awful Star Wars prequels to the original? Did you ever hear anyone say
they liked Go Set a Watchman more
than To Kill a Mockingbird? Have you
even met anyone who has read Scarlet
or Before Green Gables? One of the
many things that makes Alice Hoffman's The
Rules of Magic a joyful read is that the prequel to her beloved Practical Magic is by far the superior
novel. That's no dig at the original; Hoffman was a good writer back in 1995, but
she's even better now.
The Rules of Magic
takes the Owens family back two generations—to the childhood and young
adulthood of Frances (Franny") and Bridgett ("Jet"), the
eccentric aunts who will later raise Sally and Gillian in Practical Magic. In many ways, the two novels are the same story,
though Franny and Jet grow up in New York City, not in a Massachusetts town a
stone's throw from Salem. Fear not, they will make their way to that crooked
Gothic house on Magnolia Street with its garden of herbal delights. There is no
escaping the legacy of witchcraft surrounding Owens girls. Or, in this case,
Owens children, as Susanna Owens and her husband, psychologist James
Burke-Owens, also have a son, Vincent. Try as they will, these children cannot be
what their peers consider normal. Franny is taller than most children, has
blood red hair, loves Emily Dickinson poems, and possesses animal attraction in
both senses of the word. She is
the serious and pragmatic counter to her beautiful, reticent, kind,
raven-haired, thought-reading sister Jet, and their reckless, lazy, musically
gifted, conjuring younger brother Vincent. (For me, Vincent evokes a young Jim
Morrison.) Susanna desperately wants a conventional life for her children and
lays down the book's namesake rules: "No walking in the moonlight, no
Ouija boards, no candles, no red shoes, no wearing black, no going shoeless, no
amulets, no night-blooming flowers, no reading novels about magic, no cats, no
crows, and no venturing below Fourteenth Street." And there's another: Don't
fall in love. Affection bonds are doomed because of a 17th century
family curse and an eventual brush with Salem witchcraft inquisitor John
Hathorne*—the only judge from 1692 who never expressed regret for the trials.
It gives away nothing to say that Susanna's brood will break
the rules. After all, if they don't, we'd have a paragraph, not a novel. The
book opens in 1960, the cusp of when bending rules is about to become the new
norm. There is also the matter of the heart desiring what the heart desires,
plus let's not forget that Susanna has a sister living in Massachusetts who is
equal parts witch, social worker, and cranky crone. Aunt Isabelle plies her nieces and nephew with "tipsy
chocolate cake" whenever they visit, and she knows full well that
Susanna's desire to suppress her children's essential nature can only come to a
bad end. Her rules of magic are simpler: "Do as you will, but harm no
one."
If you've already read Practical
Magic, you will find tremendous similarity between it and its prequel:
animus toward differences, lingering historical fears, curses, spite, white
magic, difficult personalities, and the precariousness of all relationships
between the enchanted and non-gifted. But Hoffman spreads literary fairy dust
to keep us spellbound in the details of how the dramas unfold. Her characters
have depth, her prose is graceful, and intersecting stories are well crafted.
Fans of Practical Magic will revel in
new details about the Owens family, but the best thing about a well-done
prequel is that you need not have read (or remembered) it to appreciate The Rules of Magic. The only downfall of
reading Rules first is that you might
find Practical Magic tepid by
comparison. It's pretty clear that Ms. Hoffman has perfected more tricks in the
past 22 years.
Rob Weir
Postscript: This novel is not slated to release until
October, but orders are being taken now. I read a pre-release copy courtesy of
Netgalley.
*Those who have read The
Scarlet Letter will know that John Hathorne bore a curse of his own.
Nathaniel Hawthorne changed the spelling of his surname to disavow his ties to
his ancestor.
#alicehoffman
#simonshuster
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