Magic Lessons by Alice HoffmanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I feel like everyone and their mama has read this book or any book by Alice Hoffman, but as soon as I picked this book up-randomly after I got done with another book-I cracked it open and I fell into this dark world filled with magic, secrets, history, and family. Alice Hoffman has just become one of my new favorite authors that I'm sleeping on, and reading this book in the fall seems perfect. It makes me want to actually make my own tea and make black soap and just have a cozy, magical life and not have any worries. That's how this book makes me feel.
My favorite character from this book has to be Maria. When Hannah raised her and taught her the Nameless Arts, she was a headstrong young lady and also very sweet and very kind. She knew how to do many things, and when Hannah was killed, she ran off so she wouldn't be found. She went to work on a Dutch farm, where she met the man who would make her do the family curse. She fell in love hard with John Hawthrone, and when she woke up one day and he was gone, she followed him, pregnant and only had her art, to Massachusetts, where she first had the baby before she left and then met a man named Samuel Dias, who had the breakback fever.
I don't think that at the time Maria was running away after Hannah's death, she'd come across her own mother, Rebecca, who was a witch as well, but she practices the Arts, but I think a bit darker. Maria did live with her mother for a bit and even learned of a potion called the Tenth Potion, which Maria wrote down, but she never used it. I would like to think that she kept that potion handy for an emergency, but she didn't use it because it reminded her too much of her mother and how her mother used it to get a man she loved, and that she had bespelled him to love her.
Back on the boat, Maria helped Samuel break his fever, but he still had aches and pains sometimes when it came back. Maria's daughter, Faith (we'll get back to her,) calls him either Gogo or Goat, and Samuel just kept telling both of them tales. He even warns Maria against going to Massachusetts to find the man she's in love with, John Hawthorne, because it is very dangerous.
And he was absolutely right.
This was Salem during the Witch Trials, and Maria and Faith, thanks to John, were hidden. But that didn't stop John from coming to see Maria at night and smashing her before going back to his wife, and Maria had to hide herself, but only wearing red boots. Faith kinda did the same, but she had a huge wolf she named Keeper after one night coming across him when she saw some hunters hurt his mother and brother, and forgot about him. Things were going well--women coming to see Maria for the usual remedies that the local apothecary doesn't have --until someone named Martha Chase lied on Maria, just so she could have her daughter Faith.
In fact, Martha did all of that scheming to take Faith away from Maria so she could have a daughter, telling her lies about her mother and making sure that she doesn't practice the art-to the point that she put iron bracelets on poor Faith's wrists, while Maria survives her ordeal, and during her trial and thanks to Samuel coming back from the sea, Maria put a curse on her family so she won't be hurt. When she didn't die and the rope snapped, Maria ran off to try and find her daughter, only to find her gone.
But Faith, being Faith, the smartest girl in the world, was coming up with a plan to escape Martha so she could finally live her life and get her revenge.
Faith has been playing the good daughter for Martha, but has been secretly buying books to read and even finding a dark magic spellbook from a book stall one day, even after she was warned about it. When she did escape from Martha, she did had help from the peddler named Finny, who was the hero of the escape, which was a really good thing. I was worried that Faith wasn't going to escape, and when she did after Martha fell hard on a bridge, that's when she felt truly free. She even asked Finny to take the bracelets off, and she felt more like herself again--to the point that when she got to Manhattan of NYC, she went straight to her mother and also started to get her revenge on her own father.
How?
She pretended to be a new maid in his home, and waited till the right time to do it. When she served him Tell the Truth Tea and some pie with a dead dove in it, she did feel like she got her revenge on her father after what he did to her and Maria, but once she came to her senses, that's when she (or I think Maria did) put the book in the Owens library so no one can find it and use its dark magic.
I really enjoyed this book so much, it has to be one of my favorite books. Now on to the next book!
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