Magic Lessons

Alice Hoffman's novel is set in 17th-century England and colonial America, tracing the origins of the Owens family of witches across decades of love, betrayal, and persecution.

In 1664, in Essex County, England, an old woman named Hannah Owens discovers an abandoned baby girl in a snowy field, wrapped in a blue blanket stitched with the name Maria. A crow settles on the basket and never leaves, becoming the child's familiar, a creature bonded to a witch's soul, later named Cadin. Hannah practices "the Nameless Art," an ancient tradition of herbal magic, having survived the witch-finder Matthew Hopkins's reign of terror. Deep in the forest, she teaches Maria to read, write, and heal, recognizing that the girl is a bloodline witch, one born with inherited magical abilities, marked by a star-shaped birthmark and blood that burns black. At 10, Maria receives a Grimoire, a book of spells, inscribed with its rules: "Do as you will, but harm no one" and "What you give will be returned to you threefold."

A bruised, red-haired woman named Rebecca arrives at the cottage, fleeing her husband, Thomas Lockland. Hannah reverses the Tenth Love Potion that Rebecca used to bind Lockland, but after Rebecca departs, Lockland and his brothers burn Hannah's cottage with her inside. Maria flees west and reaches Rebecca's manor, learning Rebecca is her birth mother and that her true father is Robbie, a charming horse thief. Rebecca teaches Maria advanced magic, then sends her overseas for safety with a wool cloak and red leather boots, advising her to avoid love. Rebecca and Robbie are later hanged for horse theft.

Maria, now 11, crosses the Atlantic aboard a Dutch ship whose captain, Dries Hessel, secretly sells her into indentured servitude on the Caribbean island of Curaçao. Bound to the Jansen household for five years, she befriends Juni, another servant, and studies brua, or African-derived healing, with Juni's great-aunt Adrie. At 15, Maria encounters John Hathorne, a Puritan magistrate from Salem, Massachusetts, visiting on business. Captivated by Maria, he declares his love over five nights and gives her a sapphire necklace and diamonds, then vanishes without farewell. Maria discovers she is pregnant. When her servitude ends, she secures Juni's freedom and books passage north.

Maria gives birth to a daughter, Faith. She bargains passage on a Jewish trading schooner by promising to cure the captain's son, Samuel Dias, a navigator dying of breakbone fever, or dengue. Over weeks at sea she treats Samuel, and the two grow close. Samuel is everything Hathorne is not: open, emotionally honest, and endlessly verbal. He suspects the sapphire is fake and warns Maria against trusting a Puritan. When the ship docks in Boston, Samuel retreats without goodbye, hurt by Maria's devotion to another man, and Maria walks toward Salem.

She finds Hathorne on Washington Street. No longer carefree, he hides her and Faith in a cabin in the woods. She discovers he has a wife and son, and that his gems are paste. Maria buys the surrounding land and works as a healer, while Faith bonds with a wolf pup named Keeper, her familiar. Martha Chase, a widow desperate for a daughter, watches Faith and writes an anonymous letter accusing Maria of witchcraft. Hathorne organizes a crow hunt, and Cadin is killed. When constables arrest Maria, iron cuffs suppress her powers, and Martha offers to take Faith. Maria agrees, and Martha flees to New York with the child.

At trial, the court relies on spectral evidence, testimony claiming Maria's spirit harmed witnesses. Bound to a weighted chair and submerged in Leech Lake, she sinks, but the lake's serpent pushes her to the surface, confirming her guilt. Samuel arrives with a magnolia tree, plants it in Maria's garden, and replaces the hangman's rope with a salt-rotted line. From the gallows Maria cries a curse: Any man who loves an Owens will be ruined. The rope snaps, and Samuel pulls her onto his horse, but when they reach Martha's house, Faith is gone.

Maria and Samuel settle on Maiden Lane in Manhattan, where Maria searches daily for Faith while refusing to acknowledge her love for Samuel. She insists the curse makes love dangerous; he argues a curse is a fool's belief. His dying father, Abraham, gives Maria his gold wedding ring and tells her love is always the answer. After Abraham dies, Samuel proposes. Maria refuses, and he leaves.

In Brooklyn, Faith endures five years under Martha, who dyes Faith's hair black and has iron bracelets soldered onto her wrists to suppress her powers. Faith secretly treats local women with remembered magic. When Martha discovers this and locks her in, Faith smells apple pie, a beacon that Catherine Durant, a Manhattan witch, urged Maria to bake weekly. Faith escapes with Jack Finney, a peddler. Martha pursues them to a bridge and falls into the marsh; Faith watches and makes no move to help. Finney removes the bracelets, and Faith crosses to Manhattan to reunite with Maria.

Faith's return is complicated by lasting damage. She discovers The Book of the Raven, a Grimoire of dark magic, and begins practicing left-handed magic, a tradition of curses and revenge spells that exacts a physical toll, halting the lifeline on her palm. When she finds a letter naming John Hathorne as her father, the magistrate at the center of the Salem witch trials, she leaves a note for Maria and departs for Salem with Keeper.

Guided by Catherine's advice to save a life in order to win one, Maria cures a minister's daughter of breakbone fever and secures the delivery of a letter she has written to Governor Phips arguing against the trials. Signed by Dr. Joost van der Berg, the minister's close friend and a respected physician with influence over the governor, the letter persuades the governor to end the witch trials.

In Salem, Faith infiltrates Hathorne's household as a servant, serving truth-compelling tea and preparing a cursed meal so dark that Keeper abandons her. She reveals her identity, and Hathorne recognizes his daughter, but Faith decides against further harm. Fleeing through the fields, she is spotted by farmers who shoot Keeper and drag Faith in chains to Leech Lake.

Samuel reads Maria's letter confessing she was wrong about love and sails for Salem. At the lake, Maria immobilizes the attackers with a spell while Samuel dives in, frees Faith, and pushes her to the surface, but waterweeds trap him and he drowns. Maria drags him to shore and pounds on his chest until his heart restarts. Because he has died and returned, the curse cannot touch him. That night, Faith reveals she has lost her abilities, the price of dark magic, though the lifeline on her palm begins again; she will live to be old, but as an ordinary woman.

In 1696, Maria builds a grand house on what becomes Magnolia Street, with a greenhouse and gardens of healing and dangerous plants. She adds a third rule to the Grimoire: "Fall in love whenever you can." Samuel retires to tend the garden and tell stories to their daughter, Hannah Reina Dias Owens. Faith teaches at the Maria Owens School for Girls and later attends Harvard lectures in men's clothing. On the last snowy day of March, Maria finds a fledgling crow that ignores her but comes to baby Hannah's outstretched hand, a new familiar choosing its companion, and the Owens line of magic, love, and courage endures.