Magic can be an extremely tricky business to practice. In Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman, the first prequel to the book Practical Magic, Maria Owens finds this out the hard way. The book opens with an extremely young Maria Owens being taken in by Hannah Owens after finding her abandoned near her rather remote house in the English Countryside of Essex county. Hannah was a witch, but not a bloodline witch, who was known for helping people with a variety of different problems. When Maria is ten her biological mother shows up and asks Hannah for help breaking a love spell. This inadvertently leads to Hannah’s death when her husband shows up looking for her. Maria then spends several years with her mother learning about her bloodline magic before her mother sends her away to Curacao in the Caribbean. It is here where Maria starts coming into her own as she, much like Hannah, starts helping people out with a variety of problems. When Maria falls pregnant and has a daughter after a dalliance with a visitor she ends up following the visitor back to his home of Salem, Massachusetts. Along the way she meets a young sailor who falls in love with her when she saves his life. However, things get complicated when Maria finds out the father of her baby was married when they were together and she casts a curse on her bloodline for something to always happen to those who love an Owens woman.
I wanted to read this book because I have long been familiar with Practical Magic, though I will admit more so with the movie than the book. Having the opportunity to learn more about why the curse was cast in the first place was something I just could not pass up. The book was really good and I greatly enjoyed it. There were a few things I thought were well done and a few things I thought were not so well done though. I liked the way the author approached the witchcraft in the book as I felt in many ways it was pretty authentic. It wasn’t all built around the stereotypes of magic that are frequently seen in media and was instead built around the idea that intent was what really fueled the magic more than anything and that once it was out there it was incredibly hard to call it back. From my experience this is fairly accurate and I appreciated this relatively honest view of magic and witchcraft. At the same time though I didn’t appreciate the depiction that magic is so split into good magic and bad magic and that one should never practice bad or hurtful magic. It really depends on the situation and the type of magic as to whether or not it is actually bad magic. I will say that even keeping that in mind I still feel like the overall depiction is genuine which was good. Moving off of that topic, the story itself was also good as I could easily picture someone doing the things that Maria did. How many times has someone said something hurtful in the heat of the moment when they were upset or angry about something only to regret it later? The issue here is that Maria did that but laced it with her magic meaning that even though she regretted it she was unable to stop it from continuing. It really helps hammer home the idea of be careful what you wish for. Overall, a great book and it definitely deserves its 4.5 out of 5 stars.
This book is part fantasy and part historical fiction. I say that because it deals with witchcraft and witches and it also deals with actual historical events such as the Salem Witch Trials. If either of those topics sound interesting than I would recommend you consider trying this book as it is really good. I am not entirely sure how well it would appeal to readers who prefer other genres though. In terms of age range this book is primarily aimed at adult readers which I would mostly agree with. There are some mature topics and it does contain some violence, mostly because of the hatred towards witches that was prevalent during the time it takes place. However, if you keep that in mind then I see no reason why this book could not be read by young adults or teens, as long as they are older teens who are able to handle that content maturely. This is a good book and one that I thoroughly enjoyed so if you do decide to try it feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.