Rating: 
Summary: Magical history
Review: Usually I enjoy Hoffman's books, her style is excellent in my opinion, but they tend to be dark. This one isn't. It has a lot of memorable passages with some thought provoking philosophy. It's about history, and family, and forgiveness, and love...and how those things can all sneak up behind you and surprise you.
Rating: 
Summary: I think I've read this before...
Review: While this book was a very good one, I did have a few problems with it. For one thing, it reminded me to much of Ms. Hoffman's previous stories, "Practical Magic" in particular. Several of the characters seemed nothing more than carbon copies of the characters from that book. However, as I loved "Practical Magic", this isn't a bad thing, just unoriginal on Ms. Hoffman's part.I did have a hard time reading about several characters because they were so unlikeable. Stella and her constant attitude bothered me. Yes, I know she's just became a teenager and teens often don't get along with their parents. I've been there, believe me I know. But I also know if I ever talked to my mother the way Stella often did to Jenny, I'd have gotten slapped in the mouth. So, I personally couldn't relate to that. I didn't like Stella at all. Other characters are very easy to like such as Matt, Liza (well, until the end in my opinion), Elinor, Hap, Dr. Stewart, and several others. These people made the book wonderful and the way the characters banded together at the end made for a beautiful ending. This is a good read. I would recommend it to fans of Hoffman's previous work and also to newbies. It doesn't try to hard to be dark and gothic and doesn't play to heavily upon the magic of the women either, and I for one liked that.
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