Practical Magic

No. Not the Movie.

Happy Friday, Belles & Beaux!

I quite enjoy doing these on Friday for some reason, so I figured I’d cover another recent read of mine, Practical Magic. For some of you who might know of the “romcom” movie on Netflix and Hulu – and it’s not a romcom if you’ve seen it. There is nothing funny about the ghost of your freaking lover possessing your body and offering to die so that he won’t hurt anyone else. Definitely a romance, but not a romantic comedy.

Now to clarify, the movie was actually inspired by the book and not based fully on the book. Yes, the names of the characters are all the same, but the movie does not follow the book specifically. It’s been on my “To Read” list for quite a while, but I had just never really bothered to find a physical copy so I bought it on my kindle.

I wasn’t going to read it immediately after finishing Rhett Butler’s People either, but I couldn’t resist after I had started reading the first couple of pages. So I ended up proceeding to devour the whole thing. And I will completely say that on it’s own, the book is absolutely amazing. I won’t lie that it was slightly hard to get past imagining the actors and actresses in my head, but once I had, I was absolutely in love with this novel.

Practical Magic is by Alice Hoffman who also wrote a prequel novel to it entitled The Rules of Magic that tells the story of the aunts. But this one focuses on Sally and what happens when her sister, Gillian, returns past the Mississippi River to stay with her older sister and have her help her with a slight problem: her dead boyfriend.

Same premise of the movie, except Jimmy is not the dark, vampiric boyfriend that he is portrayed in the movie – which I still love to be honest. Essentially Gillian has killed him with nightshade to keep him from beating her. And no it was not all at once. She was slipping it to him to get some sleep because it can be used in those cases. However it can also build up in the bloodstream after a while which is what killed him.

The story covers their finding true love as well as figuring out that being normal isn’t always the best thing in the world. And let’s face it, what is normal in today’s world anyways? The best quote in general from this book – which is also paraphrased in the movie – belongs to Aunt Francis. “Goodness was not a virtue but merely spinelessness and fear disguised as humility.” And if you’ve seen the movie, then you know that the quote from there is actually, “My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage.”

Both denote the same thing and I’m grateful for these words of wisdom from the character that Stockard Channing performed effortlessly. Having a lack of courage to stand out is not worth being boring, so therefore, I take those words to heart deeply.

I fully recommend this book if you enjoy stories that focus on togetherness of family as well as happy endings. But if you’re a fan of the movie, try to focus on the fact that the movie was inspired by the book, not based on the book.