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Isabelle Owens might enlist them for esoteric projects like making black soap or picking herbs to cure a neighbor's jealousy, but she at least offers respite from their fretful mother's strict rules against going shoeless, bringing home stray birds, wandering into Greenwich Village, or falling in love. The instant Franny turns 17, they are all shipped off to spend the summer with their mother's aunt in Massachusetts. Heading into the summer of 1960, the three Owens siblings are ever more conscious of their family's quirkiness-and not just the incidents of levitation and gift for reading each other's thoughts while traipsing home to their parents' funky Manhattan town house. In that magical, mystical milieu, Franny and Bridget are joined by a new character: their foxy younger brother, Vincent, whose “unearthly” charm sends grown women in search of love potions. The Owens sisters are back-not in their previous guise as elderly aunties casting spells in Hoffman’s occult romance Practical Magic (1995), but as fledgling witches in the New York City captured in Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids. So too will Miss Welty's novel, perfectly poised between art and the experience she replicates and reconciles at the same time. seeking to prove some little thing that we can keep to comfort us when they can no longer feel - something as incapable of being kept as of being proved: the lastingness of memory, vigilance against harm, self-reliance, good hope, trust in one another." Still at the end these abide. But then Laurel will learn "What burdens we lay on the dying. But somehow he just "sneaks out on them" or was he hurried along by Fay, just as she shifts his mortal remains from the camellia gravesite in the old cemetery to newer ground with plastic poinsettias? Alone for a few days in the large house of her childhood in Mount Salus, Mississippi, Laurel is submerged in memories of her own shortlived marriage as well as that of her parents, always serene until her mother's long illness with its prophetic fear of betrayal such a betrayal as Wanda Fay whose encroachment was, after all, only physical - leaving behind a crumpled unmade bed or the drops of red nail polish on the mahogany desk.
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Thus Laurel returns home, after the death of her mother, after her father has remarried the common Wanda Fay, as he lies in a hospital bed following some eye surgery. Those who didn't enjoy the topsyturvy eccentricity of Losing Battles will be happy to find Miss Welty back in the changeless countryside of her earlier short novels where memory is the eternal revenant keeping alive places and people often in the mortmain of the past.