The Rules of Magic was published by Simon & Schuster in 2017. The novel goes back to the 1960s: Frances, Jet, and their brother Vincent Owens are teenagers growing up in a brownstone on West 89th Street in Manhattan. Their mother Susanna has tried to suppress the family magic — no wishing, no candles, no spell books. But the Owens blood will out: Frances talks to birds, Jet can feel others’ emotions, and Vincent charms everyone he meets.
The 1960s setting allows Hoffman to weave the family magic through the decade’s actual history: the folk music scene in Greenwich Village, the counterculture, the early gay rights movement (Vincent is bisexual), the Vietnam War protests. The siblings learn the family rules — the most important being that an Owens who falls in love condemns their beloved to death — and each must decide whether the curse makes love impossible or love makes the curse bearable.
The novel answers questions that Practical Magic left open: why the aunts never married, how the curse began (tracing it back to Maria Owens in seventeenth-century Massachusetts), and what happened to the third sibling, Vincent, who is absent from the later novel. The book was a massive bestseller — twenty-two years of affection for the aunts made readers eager for their origin story.
Collecting The Rules of Magic
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2017): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good/very good: $8–$15