Warning and the Count
Fair warning: full spoilers for the novel Practical Magic and for both films. Pull up a chair.
Here is a number I counted myself. In Alice Hoffman’s novel, Gary Hallet, the investigator who becomes the love interest in the film, does not appear until seventy percent of the way through. And Gillian’s boyfriend Jimmy, the villain of the film, first turns up already dead, about a quarter of the way in.
So my short take, which is opinion, is this. The book is darker, stranger and more tender than the nineteen ninety-eight film. The film is a romance and a comedy. And Practical Magic two, which opened this September, is not based on this book at all.
Four Parts, Counted
The novel was published in nineteen ninety-five. It has four parts: Superstition, Premonitions, Clairvoyance and Levitation. I counted the story at about eighty-five thousand words, and the parts keep growing, from roughly seventeen thousand words in part one to roughly twenty-eight thousand in part four.
Part one, Superstition, is the childhood. Sally and Gillian are orphans, raised by their aunts Frances and Jet in an old house on Magnolia Street in Massachusetts. Sally marries Michael and has two daughters, Antonia and Kylie. Then drunk teenagers in a car kill Michael, and Sally drives her girls away to Long Island.
The aunts’ real business, the book says, is love. As girls, Sally and Gillian spy from the back stairs while the aunts give a drugstore girl a love charm that uses a dove’s heart. It works too well. The man she wants cannot leave her alone, and she loses her voice. After that night, Sally never eats meat again.
Part two, Premonitions, jumps ahead eleven years. In June, Gillian arrives at Sally’s door with her boyfriend Jimmy dead in the car. Part three, Clairvoyance, is the haunting, and Kylie’s gift. Part four, Levitation, finally brings in the investigator, the aunts, and the ending.
Jimmy Is Never Alive
Here is the first big structural change. In the film, Jimmy Angelov is a living, dangerous man, and he is on screen. In the book he is James Hawkins, and he is only ever a corpse, a ghost or a memory. His name comes up ninety-six times by my count, and not once do we meet him alive.
Gillian tells Sally she kept him calm with a little nightshade in his food, and that it must have built up in his blood. But when the aunts hear the dose, they say it would not have killed a fox terrier. The book never tells you what killed him.
The film is more definite. In reported plot summaries, Jimmy is alive and abusive when we meet him, and Sally drugs his tequila with belladonna and kills him by accident. Then the sisters bring him back with a forbidden spell, and Sally has to kill him a second time. The book has no resurrection spell at all.
What the Film Kept
Still, a lot survives. In both versions, two very different sisters are raised by two aunts, and Sally is the careful one while Gillian is the wild one. Both have Sally marry a man named Michael who dies young, and both give her two daughters, Kylie and Antonia.
Both have a body in the garden, a dead man who will not stay buried, and aunts who come to help clean up. And both have an investigator who comes looking for Jimmy, falls for Sally, and has to decide how much he wants to know.
In the book, Gary works for the Arizona attorney general and flies in from Tucson after reading a letter Sally wrote to her sister. Reports describe the film’s Gary as a state investigator, and he also goes back to Tucson at one point.
What the Novel Has That the Film Summary Skips
Now the other direction. These are things in the novel that I could not find in the film’s reported plot, so treat them as unconfirmed cuts, not proven ones.
Ben Frye is the first. He is a high school biology teacher who does magic shows for sick children and owns a rabbit named Buddy. Gillian falls for him, and at the end she marries him. I could not find him in the film’s reported cast.
Then there are the lilacs. After Jimmy is buried, the lilac bushes bloom out of season, and women are drawn to the sidewalk to cry. Sally cuts them down, and a hedge of thorns grows in their place. And there is Kylie, who sees colors around people and is the only one who can see the ghost.
Even the daughters flip. In the novel Antonia is the older sister, sixteen, and Kylie is nearly thirteen. Reported casting calls Kylie the older girl in both films. The book also has Gideon, Kylie’s chess playing friend, and Scott, Antonia’s boyfriend from Harvard.
A Curse or Just Omens
The biggest change is the doom. In the film, reports describe a named curse. Maria Owens, abandoned while pregnant, casts a spell, and any man who loves an Owens woman is doomed.
In the novel I read, I found no curse on husbands. Maria is a heartbroken ancestor who built the house, and the doom comes from omens and superstition. Michael dies after a deathwatch beetle ticks beside his chair, and Sally refuses to believe it, so she goes to the library to check that the beetle eats only wood.
I find the book’s version sadder, because nobody cast anything. Sometimes the worst luck is just luck, and the aunts cannot fix it. That one is my opinion. The aunts do tuck myrtle under Michael’s pillow and put rosemary in his cereal, and none of it works.
Two Endings
Start with the ring. A toad spits Jimmy’s silver ring out to Kylie, and she tosses it into a saucer under Sally’s cactus. Gary finds it there, and that is how Sally’s lie falls apart.
The book ending is practical, as the title promises. In a motel parking lot Sally tells Gary the truth, that Jimmy is dead, and he does not turn her in. Then the aunts arrive by bus with a heavy suitcase, and they dissolve what is left of Jimmy with lye, in Sally’s biggest pasta pot. They lay twenty blue stones where the lilacs grew.
In October, a letter says a man named Hawkins was found dead in the desert, identified by his silver ring. Gillian is sure Gary arranged it. At Thanksgiving, Gary is crouched in the aunts’ garden, and Sally runs down the path to him.
The film ends very differently, in reported summaries. Jimmy’s spirit possesses Gillian, Sally asks the local women to form a coven, and together they drive him out. Gary is cleared, he comes to Sally, and the townspeople accept the Owens women as witches.
A Note on Tone
A word on tone, since that is the real gap. Hoffman writes Gillian’s life with Jimmy plainly. Gillian remembers that he knew how to hit her so the marks hardly showed.
One night Kylie is chased across a field by two men. She escapes, and the book is clear that they did not touch her. The novel also has strong language and sex scenes. Choose it with that in mind. At the same time, Gillian grieves him in a messy way, relieved and still missing him, and I think that honesty is why the book stays with you. That part is opinion.
Practical Magic Two: What I Can Say
Now the sequel, with spoilers. As of October twenty twenty-six, Practical Magic two is directed by Susanne Bier for Warner Bros. It opened in September at number one, with about thirty million dollars in the United States, as reported by the Associated Press. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman return as Sally and Gillian.
It is reported to be based on The Book of Magic, Hoffman’s twenty twenty-one novel, not on the book we just discussed. I have not read that book, and I am going only by published plot summaries, so here is what they agree on.
Kylie, played by Joey King, comes to believe the family curse is real after a boy she loves, Gideon, falls into a coma. She takes a magical book to England, where a warlock named Tom Lockland tries to steal her power. The sisters defeat him, and the curse can be broken only by the sacrifice of an Owens witch, which Aunt Frances makes.
The summaries disagree about which man Sally loses along the way, so I will not say. Gideon is also the name of Kylie’s friend in the novel, but I cannot confirm they are the same character.
Reading Order, All Four Books
There are four books about the Owens family, and I have read only the first, so this is list-level only. In publication order: Practical Magic in nineteen ninety-five, The Rules of Magic in twenty seventeen, Magic Lessons in twenty twenty, and The Book of Magic in twenty twenty-one.
Reports say the story order is different. Magic Lessons comes first, set from the sixteen twenties, then The Rules of Magic, then Practical Magic, and then The Book of Magic last. I have not read the other three.
Which to Try First
Here is my draft advice, so weigh it yourself. If you want a ghost in the lilacs and a heroine who believes only in facts, read the novel first. If you want romance and a coven, watch the nineteen ninety-eight film.
One more idea I love, as opinion. The aunts think being too good is just fear dressed up as humility, and they keep begging careful Sally to go out and have fun. Hold on to that when you compare the sisters in each version.
And if you plan to see Practical Magic two, its story comes from the last book. So the novel will not spoil it, and it works as a way to meet the sisters first.
Your Turn
That is the book against both films. Tell me in the comments: which Gillian did you meet first, the novel’s or the film’s?
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