The Book of Magic by Alice Hoffman

Published: 2021, Simon and Schuster

Genre: Fiction

Themes: witchcraft, curses, love

My rating (out of 5): ❤❤

I don't usually annotate books (mostly because they belong to the library and it would be frowned upon) but there are times when I was reading this book I just want to grab a pen and scrawl 'REALLY???' in the margin.

For instance: One of the principal characters, Kylie, wants to end a curse that has been put on her family so she seeks out a man who is known to be an expert in curses. Because of his surname she suggests that they may have a common relative from centuries ago....

'Tom realized who she was. The seven-times great-granddaughter of a witch who had been married to his six-times great-grandfather.'

Well obviously.

Anyway, Kylie belongs to a family where the women are bloodline witches and the curse hanging over them was set to prevent them having their hearts broken through love. They must avoid falling in love and if they don't abide by the rule then their relationships would end with the death of their partner. Kylie has gone ahead and fallen in love and her best beloved has been knocked down by a car and lies in a coma. She finds a book of spells that may help her break the curse and save Gideon but she need more information before she can make anything work. The book of spells was written in London and dated 1615 so our heroine immediately jumps on a plane to fly from America to England to find her answers (and who wouldn't).

About 300 pages are then filled with hexes, curses and assorted unlikely events until the curse is finally beaten (sorry, bit of a spoiler there but if it saves you having to read it yourself....). At this point I would have expected a triumphant homecoming chapter where Kylie races to Gideon's bedside to see how he's doing, but no. By the time we wearily wade to the end of the book the author has got herself so wrapped up in her other characters that any news of Gideon is an after-thought and he gets relegated to a very minor element of the closing pages.

Overall, I thought this book was probably written at the suggestion of the publisher rather than being a story that Alice Hoffman really wanted to write. That is the difficulty when writing a series of books, you have to know when to stop and, for me, this was a book too far.

Comments

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