The Sugar Queen

By Sarah Addison Allen

Josey is the only child of a successful entrepreneur. Her father revitalized the small town when he built built a ski lodge on the slopes of the nearby mountain. As a result, he was looked up to and admired by the townsfolk.
Josey was only nine years old when he died and her view of her father is a bit clouded by her childish hero worship of him. Now in her late twenties, Josey still lives at home, serving as a sort of companion to her elderly mother. As a child, Josey was a pill, prone to temper tantrums, stealing, and breaking things. She was so wild, her parents kept her home and hired tutors for her instead of sending her to school. But after her father died, Josey changed her ways and became quiet and submissive, blaming herself for her mother's seeming dislike of her only child. Josey's only act of independence and rebellion is a stash of goodies (candy, cookies, chips) hidden behind a panel in her closet.
One morning Josey wakes up to find a strange woman hiding in her closet. The woman, Della Lee, pleads with Josey to be allowed to hide in the closet and Josey gives in. In fact, she goes to Della's house and gets some clothes and stuff for her, nearly getting caught by Della's psycho boyfriend, Julian.
Della Lee continues to hide in the closet and gradually leads Josey into discovering some truths about herself, her father, her mother and about Della Lee too. Josey is finally able to face her dreams and enter into the life she has wanted for a very long time.

This was a good story, with a touch of fantasy, as is quickly revealed in the first few pages by this sentence about the South American maid that works for Josey's mother:

But the first day she was sent off to the market with a grocery list, she spent two hours crying on the front porch, her tears falling into the flower pots where mysterious South American tropical flowers later sprouted without explanation.

Publishers Weekly review: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-553-80549-9.

Garden Spells

By Sarah Addison Allen

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.