I don't even remember how Practical Magic ended up in my borrow queue at the library. Once I did check it out, however, I got sucked into the story and found myself finishing it over 5 days. The book is in the magic realism genre, there's no real system of magic behind it, and things just happen to the characters. A lot of the "magic" is the magic of old wives tales and stories, like throwing salt over your shoulders, avoiding bad luck, things like that.
What makes the story special is the style. Hoffman's style is a series of stream of consciousness explorations of the characters, with beautiful descriptions and summations of people's past history in relatively few words (the book's 290 pages long --- short by modern standards) and twists and turns. The plot revolves around two sisters whose parents died when they were young and as a result they were brought up by a pair of aunts whom everyone in town thinks are witches. The sisters are contrasts, a responsible one, and a wild one, and fate brings them back together years after the responsible has had kids and moved away from their childhood home.
I won't say that the characters are much special --- perhaps they fall too often into the stereotype of the women they're supposed to represent, especially the kind of person for whom everything is dramatic and end-of-the-world type of thing. The book's resolution is kinda abrupt --- the problems are solved so easily (by love, not cleverness), and I'm not sure can work outside of Hollywood.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book and had fun reading it.
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