Sally and Gillian were taken in by their aunts when they were small after the deaths of their parents. The Owens women have always been considered witches by everyone around them. They use black soap to wash with and have a garden that produces year-round.
Sally and Gillian are like night and day from each other. Sally is the one who works and cooks and cleans, while Gillian plays and makes fun of Sally.
They grow up and have very different lives from each other. Gillian has been away for a very long time and suddenly calls her sister and needs her help with something. They go through some major changes and become real women.
Love puts them in very different arenas. ( )

I am an Alice Hoffman fan, but this was not as good as I hoped or expected. In the middle, the book wandered aimlessly. I was wondering, "What's the point?" The last quarter of the book was much better, as the story line actually picks up a bit. I haven't seen the movie, either, and now I don't think I will. ( )

The Owens sisters, orphaned as girls, were raised by their eccentric aunts in a ramshackle house in Massachusetts and were shunned and scorned and feared by their peers, while the aunts greeted at the back door various townswomen seeking cures for heartbreak, unwanted pregnancies, and other hazards of being a woman and dealing with love. One sister left at 18 and never looked back. The other waited until her heart was crushed by widowhood until she took her own two daughters and fled looking for a more normal existence for them and for herself. But magic in one’s blood isn’t something you can escape, and despite a vow made as children, love and all its messes catch up to all Owens women eventually.

Magical realism is hit or miss in the extreme for me. If a book falls into that genre, I either throw it across the room in disgust or absolutely adore it. This one I loved. Such strong and strongly written women are found here, and their stories are a perfect blend of everyday and extraordinary. And I love that it’s a story filled with women and their relationships with one another, and although people of the male persuasion are key parts of the plot, they are certainly not in starring roles. They’re the celery of the recipe: background supporters but in no way a distraction from the main flavor of the tale. ( )

This was a nearly perfect book. I have loved the film a long time (ever since before it was released, thanks to the old Victoria Magazine's photo shoot of that yummy magical kitchen). And have watched it multiple times.

Since my friends warned that the book was not the same, I sort of avoided reading the book. But finally got around to it, and I am so glad.

No, it's not the same as the film, more subtle. But oh -- the writing is pitch perfect and glorious. Magic weaves in and out of every paragraph, and the characters are so much more fully defined.

I LOVED everything about it. Really might be one of my favorite books in years. Thank you, Alice Hoffman! ( )

From my TBR pile and given to me as a birthday present. The edition I read was published by Random House.

I watched this film not long after it came out in 1998 and is one of the few films that I've ever considered reading the original book it was based on, and 15 or so years later, I did! The book and the film are definitely different, but the overall story of the film remains true to the book and actually plays to the strengths of the 4 main adult actresses: Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Stockard Channing, Diane Wiest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZf-HiXQXnE



Gillian being the beautiful but wild one, who can never be tied down and is breaking hearts long before she runs away from her aunts and her sister.

Sally is the older, more sensible one, practical, vegetarian, science based one who soon rejects anything that cant be proved with evidence. Her aunts, being the local witches, are shunned by most during the day, but have their advice sought as soon as dusk makes their visitors' identity hidden.

The book is split up into four chapters, each covering a specific part of the girls' life.

Superstition is about the girls growing up with the aunts, and learning the price of your heart's desire. It finishes with Gillian already having escaped, and Sally moving away with her daughters Antonia and Kylie (the first set of differences with the film, where Sally never moves away and Antonia and Kylie have a much smaller part).

Premonitions is where Gillian finds Sally and the girls (who are now teenagers) in their house, and brings trouble in the form of the dead body of Gillian's boyfriend Jimmy. Sally is the one person Gillian can talk to – she is scared of the Aunts and doesnt feel she has the right or the want to ask for their help.

Clairvoyance is where Gillian settles in, finds new beau, but things turn for the worse including Jimmy haunting the garden. The lilac tree – under which Jimmy is buried – seems to grow amazingly, attracting weeping love lorn women, until the tree is cut down and burnt. Kylie and Antonia have a much bigger part than what is presented in the film – Antonia is similar to Gillian in the heart breaking skills, and Kylie – tall, ungainly, and sharing a room with her aunt – is soon influenced by Gillian's behaviour, until she feels betrayed by not being the centre of Gillian's world.

Levitation finds Gary seeking Jimmy whose malevolent energy continues to haunt the garden. The girls realise they have to call the aunts in to help and turn up the older women do, in their own style of course. The tables have definitely turned on Sally and Gillian. Gillian has finally found someone she wants to fight for and who is probably worth stability and staying put.She also realises that perhaps she is worth what the Aunts are prepared to bring. Sally has had the stability, and found that denying her past and her skills has brought her very little joy. The presence of Gary in her life – even briefly – makes her wonder whether the perceived stability is worth not having him in her life.

Gary makes a very short appearance in the book - but Aidan Quinn is a large part of the movie. In the book Jimmy turns up already dead, but Goran Visnjic has a much bigger part as the threatening ghost of Jimmy - in no small nod to his status as "taking over from George Clooney as the ER hunk" status - no complaints from me on either point!.

The story is told very much in the “epic third person” where it's a rather lyrical, sweeping, portions of time being swept away – there is very little dialogue between characters and whole decades disappear in a blink of an eye.

So: I love both the film AND the book, which is quite rare for me. Whilst the film is different from the book, there's at least enough of the spirit of the book kept within it (helped by Hoffman being one of the scriptwriters) to make me satisfied.