Magic Lessons - Alice Hoffman Fiction without frontiers London is a grim city

London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind

gathering strange herbs and taming wild beasts

my little sister went missing

As Roland Deschain

the mortal worlds will be defenseless against an onslaught of giants

Magic Lessons - Alice Hoffman Fiction without frontiers London is a grim cityFor centuries, the women of the Owens family have been cursed: any man who loves an Owens woman will die. It begins with a baby abandoned in a snowy English field in the 1600s. Gentle Hannah Owens takes the baby in, and as the child grows, Hannah teaches little Maria about the 'Unnamed Arts'. Maria has a gift for them a gift that may well prove her undoing. When Maria is abandoned by the man she loves, she invokes the curse that will haunt her family