20 supremely cozy books and movies for hibernation season

18. Practical Magic

Though Practical Magic leads with some seriously heavy stuff, it’s got the kind of dreamy, fated quality that assures you its female leads will be just fine. At the end of a long, strange year, that’s something we could all use.

The 1995 novel by Alice Hoffman begins with a whole slate of tragedy, however. The Owens women come from a long line of witches, who are cursed by a long-ago relative who wished that love and heartbreak would leave her alone. That’s generally bad news for the men that become involved with the family.

Two orphaned sisters, Gillian and Sally, later learn this to their detriment. They go to live with their aunts, the decidedly witchy Frances and Jet. Sally tries to stay apart from the world of romantic love, but then falls in love with a man and has two children with him. He later dies in a traffic accident and the devastated Sally moves back in with the aunts.

Gillian, meanwhile, becomes a freewheeling wild child. Her own romantic interests turn dark, however, and she’s often off somewhere on a questionable adventure and with no forwarding address. When things grow sour and her latest relationship with wayward Jimmy turns abusive, Gillian reaches out to her sister.

Through a series of events, Jimmy meets his untimely and (mostly) accidental end thanks to some poor dosage choices by Gillian. Isn’t belladonna supposed to make someone chill out? Guess not.

Jimmy isn’t done with the sisters, however, for he soon enough starts to haunt them in the aunts’ home. When a police detective starts sniffing around, things grow even tenser.

As strained as all of this might sound, Practical Magic runs on its own dreamy, assured logic. Bad things happen, sure, but you get the strong sense that things will work out beautifully in the end. Well, at least for the living members of the cast, anyway.