Sydney Waverley is in trouble and the only safe haven she can think of for herself and her young daughter Bay is back home in the little town she grew up in with her sister Claire and their grandmother. She shows up without warning expecting to find her grandmother, but instead finds Claire, her older sister with whom she has had a rather strained relationship. The grandmother has died and now Claire owns the old house with its very special garden, a garden filled with magical flowers and a cantankerous apple tree that likes to toss its apples at people.
Claire, a caterer, uses the magical flowers in her recipes. Sydney and Bay move in and try to fit into the town that Sydney fled when she was just a teen. With a little help from Claire, Sydney discovers that Claire is not the only sister with a special talent.
All throughout this story, I was struck by how much it resembled Alice Hoffman's novel, Practical Magic. Like the Hoffman story, Garden Spells features two very different sisters with special talents, one of whom is running away from an abusive man and, as in the Hoffman story, the man ends up dead, although his death is not shown in Allen's story. The fugitive sister seeks refuge back in their home town and turns to her more settled, calmer sister for help, another similarity. Practical Magic is the better book, I think, with more depth and a more complex and engrossing story than Garden Spells. This is not to say that Garden Spells is a bad book. It just suffers by comparison to Practical Magic. Even though it is a bit of a lightweight, I still enjoyed reading it and found it fun and engaging.
Publishers Weekly review: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-553-80548-2.
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