Practical Magic 2 just cast its spell over theaters, and if you walked out craving more moonlit sisterhood, ancestral curses, and gardens that seem to hum with secrets, you’re in exactly the right place. Watching Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman slide back into Sally and Gillian Owens after nearly three decades feels like a magic trick only real witches could pull off, and the sequel — pulled loosely from Alice Hoffman’s The Book of Magic — leans hard into the found-family, curse-breaking energy that made the original a cult classic in the first place.
It also couldn’t have landed at a better time. Cozy witchy fantasy is having a full-blown moment, romantasy sections keep eating up more shelf space at every bookstore, and autumn is basically contractually obligated to make us crave black cats, tarot decks, and family secrets buried in the backyard. So if Practical Magic 2 left you wanting to curl up with something in the same vein — sisters who’d burn the world down for each other, magic that’s more heart than spectacle, and a general sense that Halloween should be a year-round holiday — here are eight books that scratch exactly that itch.
1. ‘The Rules of Magic’ by Alice Hoffman
Before there was Sally and Gillian, there was Franny, Jet, and Vincent — the aunts (and uncle) who raised them, decades earlier and just as haunted by the family curse. Set against the backdrop of 1960s New York City, The Rules of Magic follows the three Owens siblings as they come of age, fall in love against every warning their family has ever given them, and slowly stop running from the power that’s been theirs all along.
This one’s an easy first pick because it’s not just similar to Practical Magic — it’s the same family tree. Reading it fills in exactly why Aunt Frances and Aunt Jet turned out the way they did, and it makes every raised eyebrow they give Sally and Gillian in the original film land completely differently.
2. ‘The Book of Magic’ by Alice Hoffman
If you want the closest thing possible to canon, this is it. The Book of Magic is the novel Practical Magic 2 is reportedly drawing from, following an older Sally and Gillian as a new threat to the family curse emerges through the next generation. It’s got the globe-trotting, generation-spanning scope that a sequel released nearly thirty years after the original kind of demands.
Reading it almost feels like eavesdropping on the writers’ room, and if the movie left plot threads dangling, there’s a decent chance the book already tied them off.
3. ‘Garden Spells’ by Sarah Addison Allen
The Waverley sisters have lived their whole lives under a cloud of small-town gossip and an apple tree in the backyard that literally throws fruit at people who need a nudge in the right direction. Claire has built a life around her cooking magic; her sister Sydney fled it entirely. When Sydney comes home, both women have to figure out what it means to stop hiding from what makes them different.
This is the book to reach for if the parts of Practical Magic you loved most were the ones that had nothing to do with curses — the garden, the gossiping neighbors, the sense that magic is baked into the walls of a house as much as into anyone’s blood.
4. ‘Payback’s a Witch’ by Lana Harper
Emmy Harlow swore she’d never go back to Thistle Grove, the small witch-run town she grew up in — but a magical tournament between the town’s founding families drags her home anyway, straight into the orbit of the ex who broke her heart. What follows is equal parts cozy small-town charm, rival-family drama, and slow-burn romance.
If the parts of Practical Magic that stuck with you were the “witchy community” scenes — everyone in town half-suspicious of the Owens women, half in awe of them — Payback’s a Witch gives you a whole town built entirely around that dynamic, with a lot more kissing.
5. ‘The Ex Hex’ by Erin Sterling
Nine years ago, Vivienne Jones got her heart stomped on and did what any self-respecting witch would do: cursed her ex on the spot. She didn’t think much would come of it. She was wrong. When Rhys returns to the very witchy, very Halloween-obsessed town of Graves Glen, the curse reactivates, and the two of them have to work together — closely — to undo the chaos before the whole town pays the price.
This is the pick for anyone who wants the “midnight margaritas” chaos-energy of the first Practical Magic movie distilled into a full book, set during the exact season you’re probably reading this in.
6. ‘Weyward’ by Emilia Hart
Told across three timelines — 1619, 1942, and 2019 — Weyward follows three women from the same bloodline who each discover an uncanny kinship with the natural world at the exact moment they need an escape from men who want to control them. It’s atmospheric, a little feral, and doesn’t shy away from how much power it takes for a woman to simply be left alone.
Where Practical Magic treats its curse as something to laugh through with your sister, Weyward treats inherited magic as a quieter, angrier inheritance — but the throughline of women protecting each other across generations feels like it’s from the same family.
7. ‘The Once and Future Witches’ by Alix E. Harrow
Three estranged sisters — practical, wild, and reckless in equal measure — find their way back to each other in 1893, right as they stumble into the kind of witchcraft their world has spent centuries trying to stamp out. Set against the real backdrop of the suffrage movement, it’s a book that takes “sisters are stronger together” and makes it the entire plot, not just a theme.
Sally and Gillian fans in particular should feel right at home here — this is another story about sisters who need each other’s specific brand of magic to be whole, even after years of not speaking.
8. ‘A Discovery of Witches’ by Deborah Harkness
Diana Bishop has spent her whole adult life refusing to touch the magic she inherited from a long line of powerful witches — until an ancient, dangerous manuscript pulls her back into a supernatural world she’s been avoiding, and into the orbit of a centuries-old vampire she really shouldn’t be falling for.
It’s a slower burn than anything on this list, more gothic-academic than backyard-garden cozy, but the core idea — a reluctant heir slowly reclaiming a legacy she was taught to fear — is straight out of the Owens family playbook.
Any one of these will keep the Owens-family magic going long after the credits roll, and honestly, most of them pair pretty well with cider, a porch light, and zero interest in answering the door for trick-or-treaters.
