conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled Practical Magic about Owens, Sally, Gillian with the genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fantasy
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Her 11th novel is the author's best since Illumination Night. Again a scrim of magic lies gently over her fictional world, in which lilacs bloom riotously in July, a lovesick boy's elbows sizzle on a diner countertop and a toad expectorates a silver ring. The real and the magical worlds are almost seamlessly mixed here, the humor is sharper than in previous books, the characters' eccentricities grow credibly out of their past experiences and the poignant lessons they learn reverberate against the reader's heartstrings, stroked by the author's lyrical prose. The Owens women have been witches for several generations. Orphaned Sally and Gillian Owens, raised by their spinster aunts in a spooky old house, grow up observing desperate women buying love potions in the kitchen and vow never to commit their hearts to passion. Fate, of course, intervenes. Steady, conscientious Sally marries, has two daughters and is widowed early. Impulsive, seductive Gillian goes through three divorces before she arrives at Sally's house with a dead body in her car. Meanwhile, Sally's daughters, replicas of their mother and their aunt, experience their own sexual awakenings. The inevitability of love and the torment and bliss of men and women gripped by desire is the author's theme here, and she plays those variations with a new emphasis on sex scenes?there's plenty of steamy detail and a pervasive use of the f-word. The dialogue is always on target, particularly the squabbling between siblings, and, as usual, weather plays a portentous role. Readers will relish this magical tale. BOMC main selection. <BR>Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a plot for a book titled Practical Magic about Owens, Sally, Gillian with the genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fantasy
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Practical Magic (novel): For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in their Massachusetts town.\nGillian and Sally have also endured that fate: As children, the sisters were forever outsiders, taunted, talked about, pointed at.\nTheir elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, with their darkened house, their love concoctions and their crowd of black cats.\nAll Gillian and Sally wanted to do was escape.\nOne would do so by marrying, the other by running away.\nBut the bonds they shared brought them back to each other, and to the magic they could not escape.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first two paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Practical Magic
  FOR more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town. If a damp spring arrived, if cows in the pasture gave milk that was runny with blood, if a colt died of colic or a baby was born with a red birthmark stamped onto his cheek, everyone believed that fate must have been twisted, at least a little, by those women over on Magnolia Street. It didn't matter what the problem was—lightning, or locusts, or a death by drowning. It didn't matter if the situation could be explained by logic, or science, or plain bad luck. As soon as there was a hint of trouble or the slightest misfortune, people began pointing their fingers and placing blame. Before long they'd convinced themselves that it wasn't safe to walk past the Owens house after dark, and only the most foolish neighbors would dare to peer over the black wrought-iron fence that circled the yard like a snake.
  Inside the house there were no clocks and no mirrors and three locks on each and every door. Fifteen different sorts of wood had been used for the window seats and the mantels, including golden oak, silver ash, and a peculiarly fragrant cherrywood that gave off the scent of ripe fruit even in the dead of winter, when every tree outside was nothing more than a leafless black stick. No matter how dusty the rest of the house might be, none of the woodwork ever needed polishing. If you squinted, you could see your reflection right there in the wainscoting in the dining room or the banister you held on to as you ran up the stairs. It was dark in every room, even at noon, and cool all through the heat of July. Anyone who dared to stand on the porch, where the ivy grew wild, could try for hours to look through the windows and never see a thing. It was the same looking out; the green-tinted window glass was so old and so thick that everything on the other side seemed like a dream, including the sky and the trees.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Mice, lived, embroidered.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Practical Magic
  FOR more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town. If a damp spring arrived, if cows in the pasture gave milk that was runny with blood, if a colt died of colic or a baby was born with a red birthmark stamped onto his cheek, everyone believed that fate must have been twisted, at least a little, by those women over on Magnolia Street. It didn't matter what the problem was—lightning, or locusts, or a death by drowning. It didn't matter if the situation could be explained by logic, or science, or plain bad luck. As soon as there was a hint of trouble or the slightest misfortune, people began pointing their fingers and placing blame. Before long they'd convinced themselves that it wasn't safe to walk past the Owens house after dark, and only the most foolish neighbors would dare to peer over the black wrought-iron fence that circled the yard like a snake. 
  Inside the house there were no clocks and no mirrors and three locks on each and every door. Mice lived under the floorboards and in the walls and often could be found in the dresser drawers, where they ate the embroidered tablecloths, as well as the lacy edges of the linen placemats. Fifteen different sorts of wood had been used for the window seats and the mantels, including golden oak, silver ash, and a peculiarly fragrant cherrywood that gave off the scent of ripe fruit even in the dead of winter, when every tree outside was nothing more than a leafless black stick. No matter how dusty the rest of the house might be, none of the woodwork ever needed polishing. If you squinted, you could see your reflection right there in the wainscoting in the dining room or the banister you held on to as you ran up the stairs. It was dark in every room, even at noon, and cool all through the heat of July. Anyone who dared to stand on the porch, where the ivy grew wild, could try for hours to look through the windows and never see a thing. It was the same looking out; the green-tinted window glass was so old and so thick that everything on the other side seemed like a dream, including the sky and the trees.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She talked dirty to Jimmy because she knew it helped to make him hard. If he'd been drinking all night and couldn't get it up, he'd turn on her so fast she'd be reeling. One minute everything would be fine, and the next second the air all around him would be set on fire from the fury of whatever was inside him. When this happened, either he'd start to slap her or she'd have to start telling him how much she wanted him inside her. At least he'd have something to do with his anger when Gillian told him that she wanted him to fuck her all night, she wanted him so much she'd do anything, he could make her do anything. And didn't he have a perfect right to be angry and do whatever he pleased? Wasn't she so bad she needed to be punished, and only he could do it, he could do it right?
  Talk and violence always turned Jimmy on, and so Gillian always started talking right away. She was smart enough to get him hard fast, to talk nasty and suck his dick, before he started to get really mad. He'd fuck her then, but he could be mean about it, and selfish, too, and he liked it when she cried. When she cried, he knew he had won, and for some reason that was important to him. He didn't seem to know he'd won from the start, when she first saw him, when she first looked into his eyes.
  As soon as they were done with sex, Jimmy would be nice to her again, and it was worth almost anything to have him when he was that way. When he was feeling all right and didn't have anything to prove, he was the man she'd fallen for so hard, he was the one who could make nearly any woman believe whatever he wanted. It's easy to forget what you do in the dark, if you need to. Gillian knew that other women thought she was lucky, and she agreed with them. She'd gotten confused, that's what had happened. She'd started to accept that love had to be like this, and in a way she was right, because with Jimmy that's the way it did have to be.
  Gillian was so used to having someone get her down on her hands and knees first thing; she was so ready to be struck and then told she'd better suck hard, that she couldn't believe Ben was spending this much time kissing her. All this kissing was making her crazy; it was reminding her of what she could feel, and how it could be when you wanted someone as much as he wanted you. Ben was about as different from Jimmy as anyone could be. He wasn't interested in making anyone cry, then sweet-talking her afterward, the way Jimmy used to, and he didn't need any help the way Jimmy always did. By the time Ben pulled her panties off, Gillian was completely weak in the knees. She didn't give a damn about going into the bedroom, she wanted it there, she wanted it now. She no longer had to debate the possibility of being with Ben Frye; this relationship had already happened, she'd walked straight into it, and she wasn't about to start walking away.
  When Gillian woke, it was evening and the room was dark, except for something that appeared to be a white cloud poised at the foot of the bed. Gillian wondered if she was dreaming, if perhaps she'd risen out of her body to float above herself and the bed she'd been sharing with Ben Frye. But when she pinched herself, it hurt. This was still her, all right. She ran her hand along Ben's back, just to make certain he was real too. In fact, he was real enough to startle her; his muscles and his skin and the heat from his sleeping body made her want him all over again, and she felt foolish, like a schoolgirl who doesn't stop to consider any consequences.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: But when they get there, the drugstore is dark. They stare through the window at the rows of shampoos, at the rack of magazines, at the counter where they drank so many vanilla Cokes. Everything in town is closed today, but as they turn to go they see Mr. Watts, whose family has owned the drugstore forever and who lives in the apartment above. He's following his wife and carrying the two sweet potato pies they're taking to their daughter's over in Marblehead.
  Gillian and Sally run all the way home. They're laughing as they run, so they have to stop every now and then to catch their breath. The sky is gray, the air is raw, yet it doesn't bother them in the least. All the same, when they reach the black gate, Sally suddenly stops.
  It can't be what Sally thinks. What she thinks she sees is Gary Hallet out in the garden, crouching down, digging at the cabbages, and that just cannot be.
  As soon as he sees Sally, Gary stands, a scarecrow in a black coat who doesn't know whether or not he should wave.
  But Sally doesn't care if Gillian phoned Gary last week and asked what on earth he was waiting for. It doesn't matter if he's had the aunts' address folded into his coat pocket ever since that phone call. By the time she runs down the bluestone path, it doesn't make a bit of difference what people think or what they believe. There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Fall in love whenever you can. They stare through the window at the rows of shampoos, at the rack of magazines, at the counter where they drank so many vanilla Cokes. Everything in town is closed today, but as they turn to go they see Mr. Watts, whose family has owned the drugstore forever and who lives in the apartment above. He's following his wife and carrying the two sweet potato pies they're taking to their daughter's over in Marblehead.
  Gillian and Sally run all the way home. They're laughing as they run, so they have to stop every now and then to catch their breath. The sky is gray, the air is raw, yet it doesn't bother them in the least. All the same, when they reach the black gate, Sally suddenly stops.
  It can't be what Sally thinks. What she thinks she sees is Gary Hallet out in the garden, crouching down, digging at the cabbages, and that just cannot be.
  As soon as he sees Sally, Gary stands, a scarecrow in a black coat who doesn't know whether or not he should wave.
  But Sally doesn't care if Gillian phoned Gary last week and asked what on earth he was waiting for. It doesn't matter if he's had the aunts' address folded into his coat pocket ever since that phone call. By the time she runs down the bluestone path, it doesn't make a bit of difference what people think or what they believe. There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck.But when they get there, the drugstore is dark.