Then, when Frances turns seventeen, she gets a letter from her aunt Isabelle in Massachussetts, extending the traditional invitation that all family members receive at that age.Īlthough Susanna doesn’t want Frances to go, Frances travels there with both of her siblings. Of course, by the time they are teenage misfits, they have begun to secretly learn more about their magical abilities and, much to their mother’s disdain and disapproval, have also began to fall in love with people too.

Of course, as the three siblings grow up, they start to notice that they can do stuff like read people’s thoughts, summon birds and other such things. She wants them to have a “normal” upbringing and, as such, has a long list of rules against anything vaguely magical. Susanna has decided to keep her distance from her family and has moved to New York with her psychiatrist husband, to raise their three children Frances, Jet and Vincent.

The novel begins in late 1950s America, with a woman called Susanna Owens who comes from a long line of witches stretching back to the 17th century. This is the 2017 Scribner (UK) hardback edition of “The Rules Of Magic” that I read.

Needless to say, this review may contain some SPOILERS. So, let’s take a look at “The Rules Of Magic”. A few days after that, I also finally found a sensibly-priced copy of “Practical Magic” too ( although I’ll probably save it for a while, since you can have too much of a good thing). I forgot about them for a while, and then happened to notice a second-hand hardback edition of “The Rules Of Magic” going cheap online. What can I say? I was more interested in films than books back then.īut, although I read a couple of other Alice Hoffman novels after I got back into reading regularly a little under a year and a half ago, both “Practical Magic” and “The Rules Of Magic” always seemed slightly too expensive. This review intrigued me and, sometime later, I ended up watching the 1998 film adaptation of “Practical Magic” during my “1990s films” review series a couple of years ago. Back in 2017, I was browsing the internet when I happened to see a review of Alice Hoffman’s then-new novel “The Rules Of Magic”, a prequel to Hoffman’s 1995 novel “Practical Magic”.

The rules of magic novel