Practical Magic is one of my favorite movies of all time. I love the music, the love story, and above all, the aunts. If Dianne Weist and Stockard Channing were to show up at my door, right this moment, wearing looney hats and torn stockings, I would follow them to the ends of the earth, no questions asked. I happened across the novel that Practical Magic was based on, and knew I had to read it. Usually I don’t like to read a book after watching the movie, especially if it’s a movie I’ve seen so many times as to have memorized it. But I finally read the Princess Bride last year after my one-millionth movie viewing, and loved it because it added so much to the film. So I figured I would give it a shot.
The novel Practical Magic is very different from the film, but shares enough to make them both enjoyable. The book is much more focused on Sally and Gillian (I’m assuming everyone has seen this movie/knows the storyline here, but I’ll run through the plot of the novel in a second), and Sally’s two daughters (barely featured in the film). The aunts rarely make an appearance (sad!) but do come save the day in the end.
Basically, the Owens women are all witches, to one degree or another, and everyone in town has known it and persecuted them for two hundred years. Sally hates being different, and tries her best to be a “normal” person: gets married, has two kids. When her husband dies, she leaves the town and does her best to raise her daughters as normal kids in a new town. But of course, her crazy sister and the magic catches up with her.
It’s a cute story, and Hoffman does a great job writing two teenage girls as sympathetic while exploring their anger and resentment with their family, which I imagine is not easy to do. The novel is told more from their perspective than the movie, which mainly focused on Sally and Gillian. I feel like I got a more rounded story by reading the book and seeing the movie, even though the plot lines vary. It just felt like spending more time with people I already loved.