Books by Alice Hoffman

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Illumination Night

Illumination Night was my favorite book for a decade of my life. It and Josephine Humphrey's Dreams of Sleep are two stories I wish I had the talent to have written. I read both before I was married and now, after almost 35 years of marriage, their perspectives on the complexity of a partnered life ...

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Magic Lessons

Alice Hoffman dips deeper into the bloodline of the love-cursed Owens women, those witches around whom Practical Magic (mainly about modern sisters Sally and Gillian) and The Rules of Magic (about aunts Jet and Frances’ childhoods in the 1960s) revolve. Magic Lessons takes us all the way to the be ...

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The Rules of Magic

This is a difficult book to review, since I’m reluctant to compare it too much to Practical Magic, to which it stands as a prequel.  The Rules of Magic is completely its own book, separate from the original story, although the two books are connected by virtue of being about the same family. I ...

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Second Nature

Alice Hoffman's Second Nature is one of my all-time favorite books. It’s a lovely, lyrical story, a relatively short book that feels so much bigger, the type of tale that deserves to be read slowly and every word savored. They called him the Wolf Man. He was found in the wilds of ...

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Turtle Moon

Have you ever read something and suddenly realized that it is the book you've been waiting for your entire life? That's what Turtle Moon is to me. Naturally, I think everyone should read it, but especially people who like Christy Yorke's work. Alice Hoffman has been doing "magical realism" longer, a ...