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Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
Dec. 13th, 2020 01:37 pmPractical Magic by Alice Hoffman
3/5. Two sisters are raised by their witchy aunts, then come back together twenty years later as adults who don't particularly believe in magic to navigate a bunch of family drama.
Literary fiction with some magical realism. Good at what it's doing, but Im not really into what it's doing. This has literary fiction's obsession with archetypes – the good sister and the wild sister – and while it's interested in having complexity for both, there's just something so fundamentally reductive about the way this book looks at people. Also, the fantastic elements are there for the feel of the thing, and not for, say, any interest in actually writing about magic. Wrong genre for me, basically.
Content notes: Attempted sexual assault, vague recollections of abuse, cat harm (the cats are okay).
3/5. Two sisters are raised by their witchy aunts, then come back together twenty years later as adults who don't particularly believe in magic to navigate a bunch of family drama.
Literary fiction with some magical realism. Good at what it's doing, but Im not really into what it's doing. This has literary fiction's obsession with archetypes – the good sister and the wild sister – and while it's interested in having complexity for both, there's just something so fundamentally reductive about the way this book looks at people. Also, the fantastic elements are there for the feel of the thing, and not for, say, any interest in actually writing about magic. Wrong genre for me, basically.
Content notes: Attempted sexual assault, vague recollections of abuse, cat harm (the cats are okay).