One would do so by marrying, the other by running away. All Gillian and Sally wanted to do was escape. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, with their darkened house and their love concoctions and their crowd of black cats. Gillian and Sally endured that fate: As children, the sisters were forever outsiders, taunted, talked about, pointed at. BOMC main selection.Buy the Book: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, IndieBound, Books-A-Million, Hudson Booksellers, Powell's, Targetįor more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that went wrong in their Massachusetts town.
The dialogue is always on target, particularly the squabbling between siblings, and, as usual, weather plays a portentous role. The inevitability of love and the torment and bliss of men and women gripped by desire is Hoffman's theme here, and she plays those variations with a new emphasis on sex scenes-there's plenty of steamy detail and a pervasive use of the f-word. Meanwhile, Sally's daughters, replicas of their mother and their aunt, experience their own sexual awakenings. Impulsive, seductive Gillian goes through three divorces before she arrives at Sally's house with a dead body in her car. Steady, conscientious Sally marries, has two daughters and is widowed early. Orphaned Sally and Gillian Owens, raised by their spinster aunts in a spooky old house, grow up observing desperate women buying love potions in the kitchen and vow never to commit their hearts to passion.
The Owens women have been witches for several generations. The real and the magical worlds are almost seamlessly mixed here, the humor is sharper than in previous books, the characters' eccentricities grow credibly out of their past experiences and the poignant lessons they learn reverberate against the reader's heartstrings, stroked by Hoffman's lyrical prose. Again a scrim of magic lies gently over her fictional world, in which lilacs bloom riotously in July, a lovesick boy's elbows sizzle on a diner countertop and a toad expectorates a silver ring. Her 11th novel is Hoffman's best since Illumination Night.
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