5 Magical Books About Love, Loss, and Family
1. Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
“Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women who’ve been in love with the wrong man too often.”
Sisters, New England, and magic make for a powerful trio. For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything. After Sally and Gillian Owens lose their parents, they are raised by their aunts and the four of them are shunned by their town. A generational story, the highlights looks at the stigma against unconventional women (women who have been in long with the wrong men).
2. Pachinko by Lee Min-Jin
“The pain didn’t go away, but its sharp edge had dulled and softened like sea glass.”
Pachinko is epic in ways I struggle to describe. In some books, chapters capture years in a person’s life. In Pachinko, chapters traverse moments in history. The book begins as Japan annexes Korea in the 1880s, and follows Sunja’s family to the present day. Reading it, I realized fate is a game of chance. Even when other things are lost, the ties between her family persist, for better and for worse.
3. The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
“For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.”
The Book of Lost Things follows a 12-year-old David. Living in England during the rise of World War II, David discovers he can hear books after the death of his mother. He is transported to another world of fairy tales that are barbaric and cruel. There are no happily ever afters, injecting the storybook world with a dose of realism. In David’s journey to find the book of lost things, he is caught between childhood and becoming an adult.
4. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
“The fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle.”
The God of Small Things is worth a read and several re-reads. In the shadow of the “love laws,” fraternal twins Rahel and Esthappen are raised by their divorced mother, Ammu, and her family. Ammu refuses to be shamed by society. A non-linear story, the narrative shifts between Rahel and Esthappen’s childhood and their eventual reunion years later.
5. The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien
“‘But we want young men. Romance. Love and things,’ I said, despondently.”
Edna O’Brien’s trilogy is many things at the same time; it is both beautiful and haunting, while also being funny and tragic. Deceivingly simple, on the surface, the books tell the story of two friends and rivals, Caithleen (Cait) and and Bridget (Baba), attempting to navigate Irish society in the 1950’s. Cait’s literary sensibility is both her greatest strength in surviving the expectations set on women as well as her stumbling block.
What are the books you love for hard times?
Did you like this article? Give me a follow!
