Human loss, frailties and fears, and the routines of everyday life stood on its head with a touch of magical realism--these qualities in part delineate the boundaries of the fictional landscape created by Alice Hoffman in her novels, short stories, and screenplays. Blending folklore, symbolism, and eccentric characters with the domestic novel of manners, Hoffman has won readers of all ages with such bestsellers as At Risk, Turtle Moon, Practical Magic, and Illumination Night. "The hallmarks" of Hoffman's style, according to Alexandra Johnson writing in Boston Review, are "a shimmering prose style, the fusing of fantasy and realism, [and] the preoccupation with the way the mythic weaves itself into the everyday. . . . Hoffman's narrative domain is the domestic, the daily. Yet her vision--and voice--are lyrical." Johnson went on to compare Hoffman's fictional world to that of a painting by the seventeenth century Dutch master Jan Vermeer: "a beautifully crafted...