Her entry begins:I just finished Bee Ridgway's The River of No Return, which I'd been hearing about for months. It's one of those gleefully fun books that refuses to fit neatly into a category: part heady romance, part immersive historical, part time-traveling scifi thriller. Ridgway is an English professor at Bryn Mawr, and her details of early eighteenth-century England are incredibly evocative. She makes you smell the sooty London air, and feel every restrictive layer of Georgian clothing - especially when her characters are in a frenzy to...[read on]About The Golem and the Jinni, from the publisher:
Helene Wecker's dazzling debut novel tells the story of two supernatural creatures who appear mysteriously in 1899 New York. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a strange man who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic. When her master dies at sea on the voyage from Poland, she is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York Harbor. Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire, born in the ancient Syrian Desert. Trapped in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard centuries ago, he is released accidentally by a tinsmith in a Lower Manhattan shop.View the video trailer for The Golem and the Jinni and visit Helene Wecker's website.
Struggling to make their way in this strange new place, the Golem and the Jinni try to fit in with their neighbors while masking their true natures. Surrounding them is a community of immigrants: the coffeehouse owner Maryam Faddoul, a pillar of wisdom and support for her Syrian neighbors; the solitary ice cream maker Saleh, a damaged man cursed by tragedy; thekind and caring Rabbi Meyer and his beleaguered nephew, Michael, whose Sheltering House receives newly arrived Jewish men; the adventurous young socialite Sophia Winston; and the enigmatic Joseph Schall, a dangerous man driven by ferocious ambition and esoteric wisdom.
Meeting by chance, the two creatures become unlikely friends whose tenuous attachment challenges their opposing natures, until the night a terrifying incident drives them back into their separate worlds. But a powerful menace will soon bring the Golem and the Jinni together again, threatening their existence and forcing them to make a fateful choice.
Marvelous and compulsively readable, The Golem and the Jinni weaves strands of folk mythology, historical fiction, and magical fable into a wondrously inventive and unforgettable tale.
Writers Read: Helene Wecker.
The Page 69 Test: The Golem and the Jinni.
--Marshal Zeringue
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