Alice Hoffman’s Books of MagicWe talk to the author about her Practical Magic series and its c

Alice Hoffman’s Books of MagicWe talk to the author about her Practical Magic series and its conclusionBY CAROLYN TURGEONFeatured Image © Simon & SchusterWe’re huge fans of Alice Hoffman here at Enchanted Living. When her long-awaited prequel to Practical Magic came out in 2017, we did a whole issue dedicated to it, chock full of spells and poems and odes to magic that’s of the real world, just down the street and around the corner. We’re always thrilled when she has a new book to share. Now Hoffman has written the fourth and last book of the Practical Magic series, The Book of Magic, which wraps up the Owens women’s stories—all those witchy sisters and aunts and mothers who dispense herbs to the neighborhood ladies from their house on Magnolia Street and are destined to fall in love over and over again despite the curse that follows them. Below, our editor Carolyn Turgeon speaks with Hoffman about the Practical Magic books, not to mention witches and magic and the gifts—and abundance—of sisterhood.Enchanted Living: In the cover note to The Book of Magic, you talk about that day in the summer of 1993 when you walked into a tiny shed on a marsh in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and Sally and Gillian, Franny and Jet, walked in after you, ready to tell their story. Can you talk about that a little more?Alice Hoffman: Well, the way I came to Practical Magic was—I’d never done this before, but I do make lists of titles, and I had this title Practical Magic. I just kept thinking that this was a terrific book. I don’t know what the book is, but I’m going to write it. I’ve never had that happen to me before. When I first sat down to write it, I felt like the characters had arrived. And that’s a really rare thing. The whole book came to me as a gift. It happened to me again with The Rules of Magic, when it turned out that Franny and Jet Owens had a brother Vincent. He just walked into the room, and there he was, fully formed.EL: What do all these characters mean to you, after living with them all this time?AH: They’ve come to mean a lot to me because it’s been over twenty-five years that I’ve spent with them, being in the same world with the same family with the same issues. Even when I wrote Magic Lessons, which takes place in the 17th century, with the character Maria Owens, her issues are the same issues that Sally and Gillian are dealing with centuries later. They’re a family that has been cursed in love, and really, the family goal is to break that curse. I didn’t understand that that’s what it was about. I think that sometimes you don’t really know what a book’s about until you write it. For me, it’s been an unfolding process over twenty-five years with these four books.Read the full interview here! -- source link

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