Magic Lessons - Alice Hoffman Fiction without frontiers and in the wings are

and in the wings are the Discworld's greatest witches

gathering strange herbs and taming wild beasts

the mortal worlds will be defenseless against an onslaught of giants

but it's not

And they want her to stay with them

Magic Lessons - Alice Hoffman Fiction without frontiers and in the wings areFor 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