Always love someone who will love you back. It is here that she learns her first important lesson. Hannah recognizes that Maria has a gift and she teaches the girl all she knows. Under the care of Hannah Owens, Maria learns about the “Unnamed Arts”.
Where does the story of the Owens bloodline begin? With Maria Owens, in the 1600s, when she’s abandoned in a snowy field in rural England as a baby. In an unforgettable novel that traces a centuries-old curse to its source, beloved author Alice Hoffman unveils the story of Maria Owens, accused of witchcraft in Salem, and matriarch of a line of the amazing Owens women and men featured in Practical Magic and The Rules of Magic. However, the disconnect did not inhibit my enjoyment Hoffman’s book swept me away during a time I most needed it.Buy the Book: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, IndieBound, Books-A-Million, Hudson Booksellers, Powell's, Simon & Schuster, Target, Audible, Google Play, Libro.fm, Apple Books This deeper subject is so resonant that, at times, the novel’s love theme struck me as contrived, even irrelevant, a vestige of a franchise that has grown darker and deeper. We’ve always known that, for certain women, the cost is higher. Witchcraft comes at a price to those who practice it, and with this novel, Hoffman reminds us that every woman, magical or not, pays, be it with her life, or how she must dress, or whom she must marry. That this novel is both fantasy and history is crucial. Witch after witch suffers at the hands of ignorant, cruel me. But for all its delights, Magic Lessons is dark. My current reality feels chaotic and confusing to have a narrator take my hand and tell me that linden root and yarrow will cure a racing heart, that witches turn silver dull with their touch, is an undiluted pleasure.
Storytelling is in Hoffman’s bones, and the skill with which she dispenses information and compresses time, so that a year passes in a sentence, so that a tragedy witnessed becomes the propeller for a hundred-page subplot, is (forgive me) bewitching. A lot happens, yet the plot doesn’t feel overstuffed. The historical irony provides a protracted Girl don’t go in there! brand of suspense it’s enjoyable, if a little on the nose.
A brief biography in the first novel becomes, in Magic Lessons, a rich, continent-leaping epic of Maria’s life.
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