Set in New York City and the Middle East in the years leading to World War I, the follow-up to The Golem and the Jinni revisits Chava and Ahmad as they confront unexpected new challenges in a rapidly changing human world.
This epic mitosis exponentially augments the story’s narrative power and emotional consequences ... From one crisis to the next, a strange and unbreakable alliance develops among many persons and elemental creatures, burgeoning into something even more marvelous than the rabbinical spell and the desert magic that brought the golems and jinn into being ... Fans of The Golem and the Jinni have waited eight years for this sequel, a minor eternity perfectly in keeping with the precarious immortality of Wecker’s hopeful monsters. It has been worth the wait.
Every time I pick up Dickens, I remember how his works were originally published in installments, how each would end on a cliffhanger, whipping readers into a frenzy that sent them back for the next chapter. Wecker’s chapters operate on a similar level, weaving forward a grand but slow-moving master plan through a vast tapestry of characters ... Wecker doesn’t give her readers an easy landing in her sequel; lengthy pages of exposition fill the reader in with the several hundred pages of plot they might have missed in the last book. But please don’t be deterred by that. If you missed the first novel last time around, take this testimony as encouragement to pick up the first volume. And, if you have schooled yourself in the ways of the titular monsters, then please, please do invite yourselves to this next chapter of their existence.
Spanning more than a decade and touching on major early-twentieth-century events, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the sinking of the Titanic, and the beginning of WWI, Wecker’s second outing blends Jewish and Middle Eastern mythology within a vibrant historical setting.
