Book of the Day

From the review

The Owens sisters figure out early that a rumor is a kind of weather, and the only thing to do is live inside it. Sally and Gillian grow up in a Massachusetts town that has spent two hundred years blaming their family for its bad luck, in a house that smells of lilac with something bitter underneath, raised by two aunts who never bother to correct anyone. Sally wants a normal life so badly she can taste it. Gillian wants out of the state. One marries, one runs, and Alice Hoffman spends the rest of Practical Magic showing what each of those exits costs. The novel is stranger and sadder than its reputation. Most of it is domestic. Sally raises two daughters in a tidy house on a street where nothing happens, and Hoffman gives that stretch the same attention she gives the aunts' concoctions: the specific silence of a kitchen at four in the afternoon, a mother listening to her teenager come in and deciding not to ask. The magic never leaves, but it stops being decorative. It shows up as consequence and inheritance, the thing that arrives whether or not you sent for it.