The Rules of Magic

I enjoyed The Rules of Magic much more than Practical Magic. At least part of that is that I didn't bring a bunch of preconceived notions and expectations to my reading. There's no movie version of The Rules of Magic that I've watched more times than I can count. But a bigger part is that The Rules of Magic did the things I was expecting Practical Magic to do. It almost seems to have more in common with the movie than the book it was actually based on.

In Practical Magic the movie, the girls have different opinions about love, but they embrace magic. They make wishes and cast spells and brew potions. In Practical Magic the book, Sally and Gillian both reject magic, and with it their family. In The Rules of Magic, the aunts and their brother embrace magic, against the counsel of their mother. They defy their fates to varying degrees of success, suffering victories and defeats throughout their lives. But they all learn that it ultimately does no good to deny who you are - it just leads to more pain and missed opportunities.

These lessons almost make me dislike Practical Magic the book even more. After all Jet and Franny go through, how could they neglect the care and education of their nieces so extremely.  How could they be so hands-off about it all, instead of trying to instill in them some pride of self and heritage.

At the end of the day, I got the book about magic and love that I wanted, and for that I'm grateful. It was beautiful and magical, and I absolutely loved the journeys that these three characters went on. And I'll always have the movie - which I now desperately want to watch again. I wonder if it's streaming somewhere.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Crown of Swords

Image
The seventh book of the  Wheel of Time  series is where many people agree that the series takes a dive in quality. Although I think it's less that anything changes significantly and more that people get tired of how stagnant the books are becoming. Nearly nothing happens in this book. Jordan still has serious issues writing female characters and romantic relationships. The world is continuing to be expanded on, and the rules of the magic system are slowly (so slowly) becoming more clear. But this is also a step down in terms of length. We go from a few 1000 page books in a row to one that's only 850 pages (and the next is less than 700!). Combine that with my brilliant idea to read  A Tale of Two Cities  right before this book, and I positively flew through it. I think you have to reach a sort of zen state to get through this series. There are a lot of side plots, a lot of world building, a lot of descriptions of clothing. Rather than just hating certain characters, you hav
Read more

The People We Keep

This was a really sweet coming of age tale about finding your way and finding your family. Aprils' mother walked out when she was little and her father wasn't much more present. By the time she's sixteen, April is basically on her own, stuck in a small town where everyone looks down on her and even her father mostly pretends that she doesn't exist. And then she realizes that she can leave, too. So April heads out for life on the road, working odd jobs, writing and singing songs, making friends and fleeing before anyone can get too close. And through it all her music sustains her. My favorite part of this book, hands-down, was the soundtrack. April's love of music, and the way the author uses it to set the scene and drill right into her emotional state was fantastic. I kept having to put the book down so I could bring up songs on youtube and listen to them while I read certain passages. This was just an overall enjoyable book. I had a lot of sympathy for April being
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more