Practical Magic

Like many other people, I'm sure, I picked this up because I saw the movie and liked it. The movie is quite charming and charismatic, and the book shares these traits. It has a rather Gilmore Girls feel: cozy, feminine-driven, romantic. For the most part I like how Hoffman has written this. By that I mean I like the words she uses, the sweetness and wonder with which she constructs the world of the story. But Hoffman narrates a LOT. I'd say the entire book is 85% narration, 15% dialogue. I am not talking about standard narration. And when I say she narrates a lot, I mean she explains everything you'd possibly need to know in any given scene in order to understand it. Hoffman introduces a character in a scene, and narrates what the character is doing, why they are doing it, how they are feeling, and why they are feeling that way. And I don't mean she explains it through character introspection or symbolism. She lists all the information the reader needs, and it gets very, very tedious the longer you read. Here is an example:

“Sally thought long and hard each time she hung up the phone. She thought about the girl in the drugstore and the sound of Antonia's footsteps on the stairs when she went to bed without a good-night hug. She thought about Michael's life and his death, and about every second they had spent together. She considered each of his kisses and all the words he had ever said to her. Everything was still gray— the paintings Antonia brought home from school and slipped beneath her door, the flannel pajamas Kylie wore on chilly mornings, the velvet curtains that kept the world at bay. But now Sally began to order things in her mind— grief and joy, dollars and cents, a baby's cry and the look on her face when you blew her a kiss on a windy afternoon. Such things might be worth something, a glance, a peek, a deeper look.”

Practical Magic