Magic Lessons (Practical Magic, Book 0.1), by Alice Hoffman | Free Audiobook
The woman who started the Owens curse, and the rule she broke
Every family curse has an author, and this one has a name. Maria Owens is found as an infant, left in a field on a winter night in England, and grows up in the care of a woman who knows rather more than her neighbours do. That woman teaches her everything she knows about what they call the Nameless Arts, and hands her a single rule about love before she is old enough to understand how badly she will need it. The novel is largely the story of how thoroughly she breaks it.
The man who swears he loves her leaves anyway, so she crosses an ocean after him and arrives in Salem, where being a woman with knowledge of a certain kind is not a private matter for very long. What she does once she is there becomes the reason the Owens women spend the following centuries being careful about whom they allow themselves to love. It is a historical novel with a witch at the centre rather than a romance with herbs in it, and Hoffman keeps the period detail close enough that the trials feel less like a set piece and more like weather.
It is the earliest book of the Practical Magic sequence and works perfectly well as an entry point to it. Thirteen and a half hours, read by Sutton Foster, for listeners who prefer their witchcraft historical, with the price of it left visible.
I came to this having only ever met the Owens family through the film, which turns out to be the wrong door: Magic Lessons is a seventeenth-century novel about persecution with a love story buried in it, and it is far more serious than the version with the aunts and the margaritas. Sutton Foster reads it warmly and without sentimentality, and by the last third I was rationing the remaining hours deliberately, because I did not want it to finish.
What Hoffman does really well here is make witchcraft mundane in the most useful sense. Maria's craft is practical knowledge, inherited medicine, weather sense and a set of rules about what may and may not be done, and the novel is at its best when it treats the supernatural as a trade that a woman is taught by another woman. That inheritance is the emotional spine of the book, more than any romance, and it is why the family's later consequences land hard.
The Salem sections are where the novel earns its place in the sequence. Hoffman does not stage a trial so much as build the pressure around one, so the accusations arrive as the logical conclusion of a community that has been watching a woman work for years and quietly taking notes. It is genuinely frightening in the way that ordinary historical reality is frightening, and it gives the curse a rationale that a purely magical explanation could not: this is not spite, it is an inheritance of caution.
The reservation I have is the opening, and it is not mine alone. A good number of listeners and reviewers report the same thing: the first third is slow, dark and heavy going, and at points the prose is more long-winded than it needs to be, with passages that make the novel feel longer than thirteen hours should. One Goodreads reviewer put it as the story being very slow moving with repetitive prose and a lengthier-than-necessary feel, and another described the first third as dark, dreary and a struggle, while still conceding that it reflects the period honestly. I found the same, roughly up to the point where Maria leaves England. Persistence is rewarded, and the second half is genuinely excellent, but I would be misleading anyone if I suggested this opens at a run.
The narration is a pleasure throughout, and it is worth saying what Foster does with it. This is a book with a lot of women across several generations, and she manages the shifts without announcing them, keeping a consistent warmth for Maria while allowing the colder characters to stay cold. There is nothing flashy in the performance, which is exactly the right choice for a novel that would fall apart under dramatisation.
For listeners who want historical fiction with a magical lineage inside it, who are interested in the Owens family before the film got hold of them, and who are happy to spend an hour or two walking to the good part. If you want the same subject with a faster pulse, the site's The Witch also deals in witch trials and moves quicker, and this fits a run of chilling audiobooks for Halloween without being horror at all.
Magic Lessons is the prequel to Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman, and this is the unabridged English audio edition running 13 hrs and 26 mins, narrated by Sutton Foster and released on October 6, 2020. It stands at the beginning of the Owens family chronology, before The Rules of Magic and long before the story the film is based on.
The subject is Maria Owens, abandoned as a baby in rural England in the 1600s, raised by a woman who teaches her the craft, and eventually driven to Massachusetts, where a woman with that kind of knowledge is in danger simply for owning it. The novel is a historical account of how a family curse begins, written with the period detail kept close and the romance kept secondary to the inheritance.
A free trial works the same way on every service: the month is yours, you spend it on whichever single title you choose, and whatever you pick stays in your library even if you cancel before it renews. At thirteen and a half hours this is a substantial listen, which makes it a good choice for a month where you want one long historical novel rather than several short ones.
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