Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Practical Magic

Title: Practical Magic
Author: Alice Hoffman
Genre: Fantasy, Magical Realism, Romance, Magic
Hours: 5.2 hours
2015 Book Challenge: a book with magic


When I saw this in the top 20 list of books with magic in the storyline from my google search, I immediately decided to go with this one as I thought this was what the book version of the movie of the same title I saw years ago.  I decided this would be a fun read since I enjoyed rom-com film and thought—wouldn’t it be nice to discover new details that wasn’t in the movie?
 
Well, if you’re gonna read the book thinking it’ll be like the movie, you’re gonna be disappointed.  The only things that are the same are the title and the characters.  But the story is way, way different.  It’s not to say that the story is awful, it’s just different.
 
The book is a light read but what I don’t like about it is it tends to “narrate” a lot.  I prefer knowing about story and the characters through their dialogues and experiencing what’s happening along with them.  I don’t want to be “told” what happened or is happening, I wanna feel what the characters are going through.  I don’t know if that makes sense.
 
Another thing that got a bit annoying was that the author was prone to use superlative descriptions.  Like, Antonia couldn’t just be unkind or uncaring, she was nasty.  Or when Gillian was soo in lust, she had to hose herself down… literally.. with a garden hose.. and that’s when icing her thighs wouldn’t do it anymore (really?).  Being in love with someone meant they had to be obsessive about it.  Psycho, stalker-ish even.  Why can’t it be a tender kinda love that grows over time? Does it have to be sudden and obsessive bordering on creepy?  Things had to be on the extreme sides of the spectrum that sometimes you stop reading and just go like, what?
 
Like the movie, this book has romance but it didn’t have the comedy aspect to it.  It was kinda gloomy at first that halfway through the book I was thinking to myself that, man, this Sally just can't catch a break.  But it all ends well with happy endings for the main characters.
 
It’s a so-so book where I find that the movie version was better.

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