2018/54: The Rules of Magic -- Alice Hoffman

...the rules of magic. Do as you will, but harm no one. What you give will be returned to you threefold. Fall in love whenever you can.
The last rule stopped Franny cold. "How is this possible?" she asked. "We're cursed."
"Anything whole can be broken," Isabelle told her. "And anything broken can be put back together again. That is the meaning of Abracadabra. I create what I speak." [loc. 695]

A prequel to Practical Magic (which I am now keen to reread, not having read it since the last millennium), this novel deals with the aunts -- Franny and Jet -- and their brother Vincent. Growing up in New York and New England in the 1950s and 1960s, the siblings are aware from an early age that they're cursed to ruin anyone who falls in love with them.

Or something like that. There are loopholes, technicalities, get-out clauses. Being in love is not the same as loving somebody; 'when you truly love someone and they love you in return, you ruin your lives together'; anything broken can be mended. These truisms are not much use to the young men who, besotted by the Owens sisters, meet tragic fates. Vincent, meanwhile -- the first male Owens child in centuries -- finds the family curse expressing itself in different ways.

Meanwhile, the world is changing around the Owens siblings: they are coming of age in the era of Monterey (where Vincent charms the audience with a song), of the Vietnam war and the draft, of Stonewall and LSD and free love. Despite their mother's efforts to keep them away from magic and romance, all three fall in love, and all three are both blessed and cursed by their heritage.

Beautifully written, full of metaphors that unpack into life lessons -- for instance, a cousin who becomes a rabbit: the moral of the story being that if you deny who you are, it's 'easy to become something else entirely': this is a theme that underpins the novel -- this is classic Hoffman. It felt slightly stale to me, but I think that's because my previous Hoffman read (Nightbird) shared many of the same themes, such as the ancestor who was a witch and her relationship with a witchhunter; the ancient curse visited upon a new generation; the brother-sister relationship. That's a much lighter novel, though, intended for quite a different audience: I think Rules of Magic is likely a better book, and one that I'll return to.