Writing at the height of her powers, Alice Hoffman conjures three generations of a family haunted by love.Cool, practical, and deliberate, John is dreamy Arlyn's polar opposite. Yet the two are drawn powerfully together even when it is clear they are bound to bring each other grief. Their difficult marriage leads them and their children to a house made of glass in the Connecticut countryside, to the avenues of Manhattan, and to the blue waters of Long Island Sound. Glass breaks, love hurts, and families make their own rules. Ultimately, it falls to their grandson, Will, to solve the emotional puzzle of his family and of his own identity. This special Scholastic edition contains additional pages, including a Reading Group Guide & Discussion Questions.

“Hoffman certainly knows how to enchant” ( The New York Times Book Review ) in this breathtaking conclusion to the Practical Magic series—a spellbinding and bewitching novel that asks how far will you go to change your fate? For over three-hundred years a curse has kept the Owens family from love—but all of that is about to change. The novel begins in a library, the best place for a story to be conjured, when beloved aunt Jet Owens hears the deathwatch beetle and knows she has only seven days to live. Jet is not the only one in danger—the curse is already at work. A frantic attempt to save a young man’s life spurs three generations of the Owens women, and one long-lost brother, to use their unusual gifts to break the curse as they travel from Paris to London to the English countryside where their ancestor Maria Owens first practiced the Unnamed Art. The younger generation discovers secrets that have been hidden from them in matters of both magic and love by Sally, their fiercely protective mother. As Kylie Owens uncovers the truth about who she is and what her own dark powers are, her aunt Franny comes to understand that she is ready to sacrifice everything for her family, and Sally Owens realizes that she is willing to give up everything for love. A heartfelt and satisfying conclusion to a beloved series, The Book of Magic celebrates mothers and daughters, sisters and brothers, and anyone who has ever been in love.

Accept the idea of ennobling an addict-gangleader's obsession with Honor, and Property Of could be stunning, enthralling tragedy. Reject it, and Hoffman's first novel is still an unmistakably gifted work, lavishing heart and craft on intractably unsympathetic materials. Hoffman finds poetry--terse, tough poetry--in her unnamed narrator's doomed infatuation with McKay, president of the Orphans, a street gang whose turf is "the Avenue" near the New York City-Nassau County line. We never learn who she is, though her voice is clearly middle-class and literate, any more than we learn why McKay is insensitive, a thief, a killer, an addict. No sociological cop-outs, then, just acute observation--of the Orphans (Machiavellian pusher Dolphin, hopeless Danny the Sweet), of the "girls in mascara and leather and silence" who are the Orphans' "Property." And love. "It's only love," she says. "Don't use that word again," McKay says. "Then I'll take what I can get." What she can get is front-seat sex on the George Washington Bridge, shared needles and spoons ("It was only white powder and the blue liquid of his vein and love"), and shared despair when McKay loses honor--by accidentally shooting a rival leader in the back. "Without one word, McKay was without the world," and without heroin, he's reduced to Darvon and Thunderbird, he's deposed, beaten up, and busted. She waits for him, only to find that he comes out of prison a vengeful coke pusher ("it's a start") and an enthusiastic user. Except for occasional pretentious/romantic overkill, Hoffman's heroine records the slow and sudden dyings with clarity, irony, suppressed lyricism--and even recognizes the problems that many readers will face. "Ah, I see. You can't forget that all of the words are draped in black leather." No, most of us can't, but we'll read anyway and wait for more from Alice Hoffman. (Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 1977)

"From New York Times bestselling author Alice Hoffman comes a beautiful story of one Jewish child refugee's flight to safety in Nazi German and her mother's impossible decision to set her free"--