Magic Lessons

 

 

Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman

I loved this story. I appreciated it, too, because when I finished Practical Magic I didn’t want to lose that story. Alice Hoffman must have heard me because she wrote Rules of Magic, billed as a prequel to Practical Magic. Yay! I thought, let’s go back to the beginning. She didn’t go quite far enough, there were still questions left unanswered. And so, Magic Lessons.

In Magic Lessons we go back to the beginning, to Hannah Owens finding infant Maria in a basket in the woods and bringing her home, giving her the Owens name and teaching her everything she knows. Maria had a knack, she learned quickly and well. She also had a mother somewhere who left her in the woods, and a father. But it was Hannah who became her mother and mentor. The times were 1600’s New England, it was dangerous being a woman with Hannah’s skills.

When Maria finds herself in service because that’s all she could offer society, she meets the man who will become the father of her daughter and who she devotes her love to and who ultimately signs her death warrant. She doesn’t know this, of course, when she follows him to Salem, Massachusetts, at that time the hotbed of womanfearing. And here lies the origin of the Owens curse, the one Maria declares will befall all men who love an Owens woman forever. But what else are you going to do when you have a rope around your neck?

Maria’s daughter Faith carries the gift, too. Don’t all Owens women? It’s in how they use it that matters and as we learned in all of the books, magic and love have rules but love is the only thing that will always matter.

I did love the story, but was a little confused by the claim to be the prequel to Practical Magic. I finished reading this in the middle of the night but went to my shelf to find Practical Magic and Rules of Magic. Rules of Magic also claims to be a prequel and it is, but what does that make Magic Lessons? Isn’t it better to call it a prequel to Rules? Let me give some advice. If you haven’t read any of these stories yet, start here with Magic Lessons and move forward chronologically. Of course, if you are like me and read them in the order they are written then we are moving backward. Either way, you will want to know the rest of the story.