Sometimes the degree to which I know Practical Magic by heart worked against my enjoyment, as Rules of Magic contradicts or rewrites elements of the former in order to fully develop the aunts' lives. I wanted to hold these characters' hands. I kept reading, not because I wanted to reach the end, but because I wanted to dwell in the honey-light of Hoffman's words. Instead, reading it was like being caught in a current, floating along with a river's twists and turns, glimpsing familiarity and difference in varied measure before tumbling into something like the sea. It's not a thriller by any means, not what I'd call a page-turner - there was no urgency to my reading, no skipping along sentences in order to find out what happens.

I started reading The Rules of Magic in the afternoon and didn't stop until 2:00 AM. You Must Read This Bradbury's Fiction Reignites An Author's Faith Coming of age on the Upper East Side with fashionable parents suspicious of the extraordinary, they explore and develop their powers together in secret - all the while resisting, and failing to resist, falling in love, with catastrophic consequences. But Maria's journal also urges her descendants to 'fall in love whenever you can,' and the contradiction between curse and command is at the heart of Francis, Jet, and Vincent's lives. Legend has it that their ancestor, Maria Owens, abandoned by her lover and accused of witchcraft during the Salem trials, cursed her bloodline to prevent her daughters suffering as she did. The Owens women have always had grey eyes, a spark of magic, and bad luck in love. I was over the moon, then, to learn that The Rules of Magic is a prequel starring the aunts and their brother Vincent, set mostly during their youth in New York City during the 1960s.

I wanted to be them, and I wanted their stories.

I loved their comfort with each other, their confidence with magic, their authority, their power. The book focuses on Sally and Gillian as adult sisters, and on Antonia and Kylie, Sally's teenage daughters – but I always loved best the elderly aunts, Francis and Jet. The film gave me women loving and fighting with and for each other, in a house and garden (and kitchen) to spend the rest of my life lusting after the book gave me poetry, the names of flowers, and generations of Owens sisters. I loved both, talked passionately about how very different they were from each other, how glad I was that I'd seen the film first so as to appreciate it on its own terms. I saw Practical Magic the film when I was 14, a little while before I read Practical Magic the book. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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