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.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

 

The Ten Thousand Doors of January 

by Alix E. Harrow

I’m not even sure where to start with this book — it’s so big and full of story.

I suppose we should start with January, so named by her mother for the god Janus, who looks both forward and backward.

“You don’t know a thing about me; you can’t see me sitting at this yellow-wood desk, the salt-sweet breeze riffling these pages like a reader looking for her bookmark.”

When the story opens, she seems like a normal little girl, though out of place in this time period and circumstance.

“I wondered if Africans counted as colored in London, and then I wondered if I did, and felt a little shiver of longing. To be part of some larger flock, to not be stared at, to know my place precisely. Being “a perfectly unique specimen” is lonely, it turns out.”

January lives in a manor house with a rich man for a guardian while her father searches the world for artifacts for him. It’s a bit sad, but there is so much more to the story, and as it unfolds, we are taking on a very rich and full journey.

“When I was seven, I found a Door . . . at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.”

There may not be ten thousand doors in this story, but there are a great many. There are also a great many misperceptions and the author is masterful in painting rich pictures that do not give us more information than we need to know at that point in the plot. The writing is beautiful in the pictures it presents and the words chosen.

January has a governess, Miss Wilda who is a bit stodgy, and a friend from the local grocer’s, Samuel Zappia, though she isn’t supposed to spend time associating with him. He still manages to slip her stories to read. He also presents her with her best friend, a puppy she names Sinbad. This dog is just a dog in this novel, but also all of the best things a dog can be, a best friend and protector.

January finds a book in a chest, which she presumes was left there for her by her guardian, which sets her on a journey as it tells the story of Miss Adelaide Lee Larson and her explorations through Doors.

“I wanted to run away and keep running until I was out of this sad, ugly fairy tale. There’s only one way to run away from your own story, and that’s to sneak into someone else’s. I unwedged the leather-bound book from beneath my mattress and breathed in the ink-and-adventure smell of it.”

As I said, there are many Doors in this story, and just as you think you have a handle on what is happening, you step through a new one into something that builds a new story onto the one you are reading.

“…there are these places—sort of thinned-out places, hard to see unless you’re doing a certain kind of looking—where you can go to somewhere else. All kinds of somewhere elses, some of them packed full of magic. And they always leak, so all you have to do is follow the stories.”

A fantastical journey I hope you will take.  

Book Review: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

 

The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

I truly enjoyed the author’s fourth book, Station Eleven, a story about people surviving and continuing after civilization collapses. Just like that book, there is a beauty to the author’s use of language in Glass Hotel that I find enthralling, drawing me forward through the book.

The story begins with a woman named Vincent falling off a ship at sea. Scenes from Vincent’s memory, and possibly more, play out in quick succession. She is a young teen girl, as she scrawls a phrase on a school window using an acid pen, “Sweep me up.” Time moves about uncertainly in this first chapter. “…it seems I can move between memories like walking from one room to the next—"

With subsequent chapters we move forward and backward in time, based on connections born of meaning rather than a straightforward linear progression and we see things from the perspective of different people.

After the acid pen incident, we get quite a jump in time forward and move into the perspective of Paul, Vincent’s half-brother. I would venture to say he is an unreliable narrator.

Then we hear from Walter, the night manager at the Hotel Caiette. Someone scrawls “Why don’t you swallow broken glass” on a window at the hotel, where both Vincent and Paul are working. Walter decides Paul did it, and Paul takes the blame but I can’t help wondering. Vincent was the one who wrote on a window in acid pen earlier in the story, but the words seem much more in keeping with Paul’s character. Who really did it?

There are fascinating observations of human nature, luminous descriptions of settings and charged descriptions of choices and actions.

I love how the author immerses us in the perspective of each character so that we believe what we are hearing but then when we hear about a situation later from another character, we can find that things are not so black and white.

“But does a person have to be either admirable or awful? Does life have to be so binary? Two things can be true at the same time, he told himself.” Is it just Paul justifying himself or is it true? Can it be both?

I love the subtle suspense that draws me through the book, from the beginning when we wonder if Vincent is dead or not, and whether Paul is unstable and murderous, to when we read of Jonathan Alkaitis - a successful businessman but then comes the line “Nothing about him, in other words, suggested that he would die in prison.”

It turns out Jonathan has created a Ponzi scheme. He takes people in, right and left, including Vincent. Even in their relationship there is a strange layer of illusion. They are not married but he insists she wear a ring and introduces her as his wife. Ghosts and hallucinations swirl in the peripheral vision as the story progresses.

As with Station Eleven, the author gives the reader beautiful pieces of a puzzle, drawing the reader on with tantalizing glimpses of foreshadowing, that eventually come together to form a complex portrait of people who are neither evil nor innocent.

I highly recommend this book.

Book Review: The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan

The Bookshop on the Corner

by Jenny Colgan

Our book club picked a theme for this month of “titles with a book store in them.” I did a search in our digital catalog and came up with this one. I didn’t know the author, but I am glad I do now.

The “Message to Readers” at the beginning had me in stitches. Colgan talks about all the different places she reads, one being with her e-reader in the bathtub.

“You may not have been blessed with a magnificent Scots-Italian Peter Capaldi nose like me, but with a bit of practice you should soon find it’s perfectly possible to keep one of your hands in the water and turn the pages at the same time.”

The main character, Nina, is a librarian who has lost her job to a restructuring, but she attends a workshop that asks the question, “What do you really want to do?”

Nina hadn’t admitted to anyone that what she really had always wanted to do was to open a little bookstore. In fact, she has been hoarding books in her Birmingham flat for years, and her roommate, Surinder, is very much afraid the floor joists are going to go one of these days.

“Yet much as she disputed the fact, it was time to admit that books were not real life. She’d managed to hold reality at bay for the best part of thirty years, but now it was approaching at an incredibly speedy rate, and she was absolutely going to have to do something – anything – about it.”

Reality is a big theme in this book. Nina, like many of us who spent a good part of our lives in books, is incredibly adept at creating her own reality. That can lead to problems, but sometimes it takes the dreamers to dream something big and make it possible. If we can’t imagine it, we can’t create it.

With that desire in her brain, Nina does a simple little search for a van that she could turn into a mobile bookshop. She finds the perfect one, but it’s all the way up in Scotland.

The whole thing snowballs and it seems like the Universe has heard her desire and approves. Everything moves her in that direction. She has a little help along the way, from a barkeep and his patrons who want a local bookshop to a lady who knows the perfect place for her to rent, to a train engineer who helps her when her truck stalls on a rail and is a hairsbreadth away from being creamed.

There are friendships, and romance, and even love in the end. The journey zooms along and I would have given this book something between a 4 and a 5 but for the about face one character does. I could buy it, if the author had described it better, shown us the outward signs that signaled the inner journey taking place in that short amount of time, but she rushed it, and it really hurt the story for me – so I would rate it 3.5.

Though some things are glossed over, it’s a great journey and there are some wonderful observations.

“A dead Web site was a sad thing, she thought. Full of hope when it had been set up, and now floating away down the Google drain, gently decaying.”

I’m currently reading her second novel and it is even better than the first. I think Colgan grew as an author and there is so much wonderful in The Bookshop on the Shore, that I can’t wait to get back to reading it tonight. You could read the second before the first, but I don’t regret reading the first and would still recommend it for a modern slice of life and journey of growth.

Book Review: A Man Called Ove

A Man Called Ove
by Fredrik Backman

I'm shocked that I haven't reviewed this book here already. I loved it!

At first glance, this sounds like a morbid story. Either that or a moral story about depression. But it isn't treated that way. It's a fantastic story with a rich vein of humor running through an incredibly moving story.

Perhaps it is the Swedish point of view that makes it so different. I was glad that I listened to it in audio because I certainly wouldn't have known how to say the main character's name, and knowing gives it a very different feel.

Ove (Oo-vah) just seems like a cantankerous old man at first but as you learn more about the events that shaped him and his heartaches, you can't help rooting for him. He seems to be done with life, but life isn't done with him.

Ove lives in a small community with a variety of characters but he is keeping to himself when the story begins. He also has every intention of committing suicide. We don't know why at first. When a family moves in next door, events seem intent on thwarting his attempts at every turn, often in humorous ways.

Ove gradually finds there are things he needs to do before he dies, and he is drawn back into the lives of those around him. He doesn't want to help them, but he simply can't stand incompetence, and often he can't stand cruelty to others either.

It was just beautifully written. At every turn, it opened up more of the story and a different perspective. It is one of the best books I've ever read and I can't wait to read more by the author.

I did watch the movie later but it simply didn't hold a candle to the book. I highly recommend it.

Book Review: The Golem and the Jinni

The Golem and the Jinni

by Helene Wecker

This is a literary fantasy novel of the very highest caliber.

The Golem is created by a man at the request of another.

The man who created the golem was once a promising Rabbianic student but then, “Yehudah Schaalman awoke to darkness and the certain knowledge that he was somehow damned.”

The man who purchased the Golem’s life brings her to America, waking her on the ship over, but he is ill. He dies and she is left to fend for herself.

She sees the Statue of Liberty for the first time – “ . . . those on deck were waving and shouting at her with jubilation, crying even as they smiled. This, too, the Golem thought, was a constructed woman. Whatever she meant to the others, she was loved and respected for it. For the first time since Rotfeld’s death, the Golem felt something like hope.”

That is, until a wise man sees her and realizes what she is. He takes her in and helps her cope with her own existence. The golem hears and feels people’s thoughts and desires, it is overwhelming at times. The Rabbi tells her -

“A man might desire something for a moment, while a larger part of him rejects it. You’ll need to learn to judge people by their actions, not their thoughts.”

The golem knows what she is.

She looked back down to her fingertips. Nails, teeth, hair: none of these features were made of clay.

“I hope,” she said, watching her own mouth move, “that no one was harmed in my making.”

The Rabbi’s response is one of my favorite lines in the book -

The Rabbi smiled sadly. “So do I. But what’s done is done, and you are not to be blamed for your own creation, whatever the circumstances.”

The Jinni is very old and his existence has been whimsical, spying on travelers near the desert where he grew up in Syria, building his own invisible palace in the desert of glass and gold. But there is a huge lapse of time when he does not know what happened, he simply wakes when a metal smith in New York City breaks the words binding him into a tea kettle that came from Syria by rubbing out some words. The metal smith kindly helps him find his footing, gives him a home and employment. The Jinni is still bound by a metal cuff on his wrist, to keep him from doing any magic.

This story brings the Golem and Jinni together in a version of New York City very long ago. Their lives before they meet and during the time they know each other are beautifully wrought.

The descriptions are detailed and the story is thought provoking. It goes into the back story of each character quite deeply.

I cannot emphasize enough how beautifully constructed and told this story is. This is one of those stories that you wish you could wipe from your mind in order to have the pleasure of discovering it all over again. It deserves far more than five stars. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Where the Crawdads Sing

by Delia Owens

I have to confess that while I found the book mildly entertaining, maybe even diverting, I did not find it the riveting read some other people did. It did not grip me with the fervor other books have over the past couple years.

The most interesting aspects to me were how the main character, Kya, survived in the swamp, her ingenuity as a child, and the descriptions of the swamp land itself.

It was a coming-of-age story, but again, I just wasn’t riveted.

There was a murder mystery to the story but it was very mild. I wasn’t all that curious to know who had done it. It had to be one of a half dozen people, but I just didn’t care enough to find out who it was. Still, I read on.

I did listen to this on audio which slows things down a bit. Maybe if I’d been reading it in hard copy, I would feel a little differently.

Kya is a young girl living in the swamps of North Carolina. Everyone seems to leave eventually, from her mother at first, then her siblings one by one, and finally her father. But Kya doesn’t leave. She survives, by her wits, and with a bit of help from a local man who runs a small boat refueling station and store. She grows, thrives, and meets a couple young men. They both promise her things they don’t deliver on, but she keeps going.

There are beautiful descriptions and turns of phrase, to be sure. The setting was the most wonderful part of this book. The plotting left a good bit to be desired. The characterization was, for me, a little two dimensional.

I would give it three stars. If you’re looking for a quiet book with lovely descriptions, something comfortable and diverting, this is a nice book for that.

La's Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith

La’s Orchestra Saves the World

by Alexander McCall Smith

Though the plot in the first part of the book seemed a bit trite to me, Alexander McCall Smith’s writing and the plot in the rest of the book struck me as slice-of-life writing at it’s most beautifully realistic.

La is pursued by a young man in college, prior to World War II, and agrees to marry him. She isn’t sure she loves him at first but thinks they will make a compatible marriage. She does come to love him very much and is devastated when he runs off to be with a lover in France. His father is ashamed as well. He gives La the husband’s portion of the family business and a house in Suffolk.

La moves into the house just before World War II and the story is moved forward by some minor intrigue as La gets comfortable in her new home. But then the war arrives and La goes to apply for “war work.” They don’t have much for her. The major encourages her toward the Women’s Land Army and La ends up helping with a farmer’s chickens.

The story explores simple village life in Great Britain during World War II, what people thought and felt. How it could be affected by outsiders coming in, rationing, simple pleasures, and how distanced it was from the conflict at the same time. They grew their own vegetables. They listened to the radio for news. It’s the minutiae of daily life and the reflection that make a slice of life novel. World War II is the backdrop but life goes on in spite of those events.

La meets a friend’s brother, Tim, who works at the RAF base and together they start a village orchestra. Of course, the orchestra doesn’t really save the world but it can be argued that it saves a number of people from abject despair, La included. The orchestra creates connections between people — village people, country folk, and people from the Royal Air Force base that all need something to sustain them.

Tim gets a worker from the base, a Polish airman with a damaged eye, assigned to help at the same farm where La works. She is quite smitten but Feliks is distant.

It is a slow book but the ending may have been my favorite part as you see how things come full circle and how such simple things as a village orchestra and one person can change the world for some people. It’s about how a single life does matter and what we do, the kindness we offer, the connections we make, matter. They may be the only things that do give meaning to life on this scale.

Is it unrealistic to hope that Feliks and La meet again and share some part of their life together? There are elements of chance and there are things the characters do to make things happen. Isn’t that true to life? 

In the end, the writing skill of the author and the way he ties things together, make this an enjoyable story. The pace of life in the country, the drudgery and the simple pleasures, make it enjoyable. If you’ve experienced that, you’ll recognize it. If you haven’t, you may find it enjoyable to see it from a distance.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

The Dud Avocado

by Elaine Dundy

Guest review by Tarren Young – Thank you, Tarren!

I LOVED this book! Although it took me a month to read it, it wasn’t because it wasn’t fascinating; rather, it was the fact that I borrowed it from the library and had to stop every two to four pages to jot down ideas, quips or quotes from the book instead of being able to highlight in my own copy. This WILL be added to my personal library!

I was floored when, somewhere around page sixty-ish, I realized that this book was fiction and NOT memoir! And that is the number one reason why I loved this book: it’s fiction, but reads like memoir.

The book is told from the perspective of Sally Jay Gorce, a young (we’re not actually told her age, somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two) American who has finally made it to Paris on her Uncle Roger’s dime, in exchange for stopping her numerous runaway attempts from prestigious, and boring, boarding schools on the East Coast of America.

But the problem is, Sally Jay is, as we learn through her foibles, The Dud Avocado—and she doesn’t realize it through most of the story - that she’s green and just a kid. In fact, she gets rather temperamental at the mere mention of someone calling her “kid” which, coincidentally, happens a lot.

I really couldn’t help but laugh at Sally’s insights on her new friends who are “artists” in Paris, or as she calls them “The Hard Core,” and her pet names for all of them - such as the two that have beards and, even thought not related, look so much alike that she calls them “Beard Boring” and “Beard Bubbly.”

I truly think the reason I connected so much with Sally Jay is the fact that she is young and naïve and reminds myself of a younger me, sans the traveling and living in Paris on a two-year monthly stipend from a rich uncle.

Bunny trail: I just realized that mirrors are symbolic in the story because they appear every couple pages or chapters at the least, and I didn’t realize how much they were mentioned throughout the book until now. But it makes sense, as Sally Jay, often looks in and at mirrors, but has a hard time seeing the truth reflected back at her because she is so young and green. She is always trying to run away from something or run into something new and exotic instead of slowing down to reflect on things in her life, until it’s too late. By then she’s already wrapped up in a hot mess of trouble.

Pg. 44 “And in a way I kind of gave up on myself. I gave up wondering if anyone was ever going to understand me at all. If I was ever going to understand myself even. Why was it so difficult anyway? Was I some kind of nut or something? Don’t answer that.” ~I just can’t get over how much Sally Jay talks and thinks like me!

Part two is laid out in a journal format, still with chapters though. Of course the whole book is in first person, Sally Jay telling her own story. But I think it was nice to read the diary format and get into some really deeper things, and some things just quick and nitty gritty.

The avocado scene brings the whole story together. The whole metaphor behind the title, and ultimately true story of Sally Jay’s naivety and realizing that for how much she tried to act and tell herself that she wasn’t naïve, that she wasn’t green, that she was part of the “club,” she never really was, and the realization that she is a Dud Avocado really depresses her.

Honestly, I think this has, hands down, the best love scene I have ever had the pleasure of reading. It’s very sensual without being overly erotic. It makes you stop to admire all the background details and pine away to know the backstory and dream, longingly, that you too could also be one of those beautiful woman.

I still think Sally Jay is still a bit naïve at the end, even though she is getting married. She has spent her whole life running away from what society tells her she has to do—she doesn’t want to get married. She doesn’t want to have children and cook and do the domestic thing, so when she finally decides to say yes to marriage, she still thinks that’s the end of her life. That she will no longer have the chance to be exotic. I mean, “…it’s the end…!”  Is it not?