Book Review: The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker

 

The Hidden Palace  

by Helene Wecker

It is not every day that a book of this caliber comes along. I tried to savor it, to read it slowly, really hear the words in my head, but I confess that I stayed up late Sunday night rushing through the ending. If you haven’t read The Golem and the Jinni, I highly recommend you go and read that one before reading this one. I promise you it will be worth it.

You can find my review of the original book here https://storymusing.blogspot.com/2020/04/book-review-golem-and-jinni.html

A quick recap – In The Golem and the Jinni we meet the main characters, Chava Levy, who was created to be a bride for a man who dies on the ocean crossing to America, and the Jinni, Ahmad al-Haidid, who was bound with iron by a wizard and ended up in a flask that was sent to America. Chava and Ahmad meet in New York during the early part of the 20^th century. There is a myriad cast of neighborhood characters where Chava lives, where the Jinni lives, and even up town, where Sophia Winston lives.

In this book, we add in Kreindal Altschul, a young woman whose rabbi father creates another golem to take to Europe to help his people, but never has the chance. Kreindal ends up in an orphanage, master of a golem in hiding.

Sophia returns, somewhat changed and continuing to change over the course of the novel as she travels to the Middle East in search of treatments or a cure for her ailment. She comes into contact with a Jinniyeh, who is much like the Jinni was in the beginning, arrogant and a loner, concerned only with her own well-being and needs.

Chava’s friend Anna Blumberg returns with her son, Toby. There are limits to Anna’s friendship with Chava. She knows what Chava is and what she can do, has seen it, and her first priority is always keeping Toby safe, sometimes to his detriment.

Maryam and Sayeed Fadoul, purveryors of a small coffee shop in Little Syria also return, trying to run interference between the people of the neighborhood and the strange power they know Ahmad holds.

Things are a bit tense between Chava and Ahmad now. He's restless and becoming irritable. They tend to debate and squabble just as part of their relationship. They also have very different perspectives of the world, she was literally created to serve while his entire existence is founded on being a creature of whimsy with little natural constraints because of his power. He naturally chafes at the restraints from time to time in this different type of existence.

I've loved every little interlude and vignette that make up the fully realized whole. Wecker is a fantastic story teller. She brings history to life in a fantastical story. Her sidelong description of the Triangle factory fire is heartbreaking as we see how it affects people in the story. The storyline is at once fresh and original, the plot surprising and yet reasonable, so that one thinks, ah, of course that happened, after it happens.

I can’t recommend this book, and the first, highly enough. I look forward to the next one though I fear it will be few years before it is ready.