A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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All in Reading Fun
I convened with the Owens family in Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic (1995), Rules of Magic (2017), and Magical Lessons (2020). By reading all three novels together, I enjoyed a month of magically lovable witches battling the challenges and frustrations of being independent creatures in a world that doesn’t appreciate their unconventional style or power. Hoffman’s novels build prequel upon prequel as she works closer and closer to the root of the Owens’ family story and its curse.
Set in the early twentieth-century English county side, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, is the first-person journal of Cassandra Mortmain in year of her eighteenth birthday.
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe serves up recipes for good living and good eats as it weaves two story lines together. It reflects upon the complicated history of a tiny Alabama town during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the struggle of one middle-aged woman’s attempts to love herself near the century’s end.
Tom Robbin’s Jitterbug Perfume (1984) tells the wild, at times bizarre, story of a number of characters scattered across geography and ages: a Dark Ages king-peasant-philosopher, Alobar; his beloved, Hindu Kudra; a misfit waitress in Seattle, Priscilla; a pair of French cousins whose family has worked in the industrial perfume business for centuries; and two women who comprise a small, even seedy, New Orleans perfume shop in the French Quarter. A wacky, philosopher/swindler, Dr. Dannyboy Wiggs, somehow manages to unite them all with his Last Laugh Foundation. To make the story even more zany, beets—yes, the root vegetable—show up randomly throughout the narrative.
