The Tale of Talisman : In these novels, extravagant storytelling confronts betrayal, dispels the blues and names a father’s fears : PRACTICAL MAGIC, <i> By Alice Hoffman (Putnam: $22.95; 256 pp.)</i>

In “Poetry,” Marriane Moore suggests that a good poem should “present for inspection imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”

Alice Hoffman’s whimsical new novel, “Practical Magic,” on the other hand, presents by design imaginary gardens with imaginary toads in them. These toads are crazy about Snickers candy bars, are “really quite pretty, with smooth, watery skin and green eyes,” and one toad even climbs a tree to enter a maiden’s bedroom and spit into her palm the bloodstained silver ring of a murdered man.

Oh, there are spooky doings in “Practical Magic.” But nothing really scary. The thrills are of the kind commonly described as delicious.

Orphaned when their parents die of love (sort of), sisters Sally and Gillian are raised by a pair of aunts more accomplished at raising spirits. “The little girls . . . who lived up in the attic . . . were never told to go to bed before midnight or reminded to brush their teeth. No one cared if their clothes were wrinkled or if they spit on the street. All the while these little girls were growing up they were allowed to sleep with their shoes on and draw funny faces on their bedroom walls with black crayons. They could drink cold Dr. Peppers for breakfast, if that was what they craved, or eat marshmallow pies for dinner. They could climb up to the roof and sit perched on the slate peak, leaning back as far as possible, in order to spy the first star. There they would stay on windy March nights or humid August evenings, whispering, arguing over whether or not it was feasible for even the smallest wish to ever come true.” (This playful, storybook style is characteristic of the book’s prose. Whether you are charmed or vexed by it is a matter quite out of my hands.)

The witchy old aunts are more twinkly than wicked, but they do not enjoy good repute in their village. Though it’s true that under certain stresses their neighbors beat a path to the kitchen door--past the rosemary bush and the bleached horse skull said to be useful for keeping the local kids out of the strawberries. The old aunts dabble in black arts, with love and the failure of love their field of special interest. (Everyone in this book mucks about with love, the aunts are just more businesslike.) It is known, for example, that the aunts are perfectly able to deliver a wandering husband to your door--even if the door he wandered from was someone else’s.

Since witches’ blood is in their nature and their nurture isn’t worth a bell, book and candle, there’s nothing for the girls to do but tough it out and wait for bone growth. In the meantime, Sally, who is “matter-of-fact, no-nonsense,” does what she can for her sister and herself with a diet of bean sprouts and tofu. Gillian, though, is not only rebellious, she’s a dish.

Off they go, in due course, to their separate and variously cluttered destinies, neither of them having two licks of love luck to rub together. Sally finds true love, but he dies, leaving her respectable, admired, alone, and mother to a couple of disputatious daughters. Gillian finds untrue love in the shape of three unsatisfactory husbands and a passel of also-rans, one of them a gaudy miscreant who cumbersomely dies on her and possibly at her hands--she’s been doling out doses of deadly nightshade to clean up his deportment. The sisters, who have been at odds, regroup over the corpse. They tuck it away beneath poor Sally’s lilacs, to the lilacs’ immediate and drastic benefit. (Ma Nature is a character in this book and vigorously underscores the moods and the action with storms and sunrises, floods and flowerings, mists and moonshine. Chance and luck and the animal kingdom do their conspicuous bit as well.)

There are now four women of the same bewitched blood in Sally’s house, if we count her peevish daughters, and we’d better. All of these females are haunted and love struck, lovesick in one way or another. “Sally watches her daughter [Kylie] and worries. She knows what happens when you bottle up your sorrow, she knows what she’s done to herself, the walls she’s built, the tower she’s made, stone by stone. But they’re walls of grief, and the tower is drenched in a thousand tears, and that’s no protection: It will fall to the ground with a single touch of someone’s hand. Now, when she sees Kylie climb the stairs to her bedroom, Sally sees another tower being built, a single stone perhaps, but still enough to chill her. She tries to talk to Kylie, but each time she approaches her, Kylie runs from the room, slamming the door behind her.”

Haunted and skittish, these women are given to stiff-arming Mr. Right whenever he turns up. There’s a great deal of moping and mewling, and the body under the bountiful lilacs means nobody any good. In keeping with the fairy-tale tone of all these goings-on, the longed-for princes appear and persist, tremulous and yearning in their turn, but steadfast and indelibly loving.

Gillian’s fella, sometimes considered “the handsomest man in New York,” is the local biology teacher, an amateur magician who turns pantyhose into dachshunds--don’t ask me any questions--and worries a lot about Buddy, his bunny. Sally’s swain is a weepy, right-thinking, stunningly attractive lawman. The daughters get their good guys too. One of these shaves his head and practices belching; the other, a reformed nerd, ties his long locks back with a thong. The old aunts lay the ghost in the garden. All parties are giddy with love and kinship and perhaps, just perhaps, they all live happily ever after. Though that does seem unlikely, witch blood or none.

“Practical Magic” deals in tears and troubles and it tosses out many a truism about evil and the woe of it all, but it’s a sentimental, cheerful book. Some of it is hokum, some of it is hocus-pocus. But I suspect a lot of readers are going to find it fun.