Quieter attractions she's serious and practical, somewhat grim. In her teens, Gillian becomes a great beauty: "Boys looked at her and got so dizzy they had to be rushed to the emergency room for a hit of oxygen or a pint of new blood." She's a bit too popular for her own good. Passion is what gets you in trouble - but it is also what gives life its sweetness, and it can never be denied. Hoffman writes, "Sally and Gillian would lock pinkies and vow never to be ruled by their passions." Of course, this is a vow designed to be broken. Some woman was crying in their kitchen," Ms. "On evenings when the orange moon was rising in the sky, and The youngsters eavesdrop from behind a door. Sometimes the charms work, but sometimes a woman wants too much from love and the magic enslaves her. At twilight, the women of the town steal up to their kitchen door, seeking potions with which to repair Several children had fainted some would be phobic about cats forīut the aunts' specialty is something trickier than ill-mannered cats these little old ladies in black are actually the witch doctors of love. Sally's reputation is ruined when the aunts' passel of mangy black catsįollows her to school and invades the classroom: "A panic had spread and the more high-strung of Sally's classmates were already whispering witchery. The kids in school chase them and hiss and throw apples and stones, which always land at their feet. The girls soon learn what it means to be raised by a couple of witches. The Massachusetts town where Sally and Gillian live with their elderly aunts is never named. Them "Night and Day." Gillian is fair and blond, while Sally's hair is "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." The two girls staring from the attic window of the big, spooky house on Magnolia Street are the youngest Owens sisters, Sally and Gillian, just 13 months apart in age but so different from each other that their aunts, who are raising these orphans, call "If a damp spring arrived, if cows in the pasture gave milk that was runny with blood, if a colt died of colic orĪ 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." "For more than 200 years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town," the story begins. They don't have time for lives of quiet desperation - they're too busy subduing ghostsĪnd trying to figure out how much nightshade it takes to kill a grown man. The people in her latest novel, "Practical Magic," live in a world of incantations and Formica, magic potions and linoleum. There's something about those winding streets lined with identical houses that sets her to imagining witches, magicians, black cats, wicked crows, helpful toads, spells, hexes, presentiments. SUBURBIA is where Alice Hoffman goes for a taste of dark magic. June 25, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
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