This is a debut novel that won the 2014 Nebula and the 2014 Mythopoeic Awards, it was also a NYT bestseller.
I read this because I thought it a "Lincoln's Doctor's Dog" story; that is, a story with all the elements currently popular. It is an urban fantasy, set in 1899, drawing on both Jewish and Syrian folklore and rooted firmly in those ethnicities.
Chava, the golem, appears to be an attractive, if somewhat odd, recent immigrant to the Jewish section of New York City. She is painfully shy and naive. Ahmad, the jinni, is a young man who has recently come to live in the bordering "Little Syria" enclave of Maronite Christians. He is a little more outgoing and worldly but not much. Both live lives that are enormously complicated by their magical natures, particularly when their pasts, unusual even for such miraculous creatures as they are, catch up to them.
Turn of the century NYC, and the ethnic communities then existing, are almost characters in the tale as well. While the style shows familiarity with Jewish and Syrian cultures of the age it is modern throughout.
I found this story to be charming and, at times, profound. The narrative had a definite end, but its two main themes, that of loneliness and the difficulty of assimilating into society, were unresolved, so it also left itself open to a sequel.
I read this because I thought it a "Lincoln's Doctor's Dog" story; that is, a story with all the elements currently popular. It is an urban fantasy, set in 1899, drawing on both Jewish and Syrian folklore and rooted firmly in those ethnicities.
Chava, the golem, appears to be an attractive, if somewhat odd, recent immigrant to the Jewish section of New York City. She is painfully shy and naive. Ahmad, the jinni, is a young man who has recently come to live in the bordering "Little Syria" enclave of Maronite Christians. He is a little more outgoing and worldly but not much. Both live lives that are enormously complicated by their magical natures, particularly when their pasts, unusual even for such miraculous creatures as they are, catch up to them.
Turn of the century NYC, and the ethnic communities then existing, are almost characters in the tale as well. While the style shows familiarity with Jewish and Syrian cultures of the age it is modern throughout.
I found this story to be charming and, at times, profound. The narrative had a definite end, but its two main themes, that of loneliness and the difficulty of assimilating into society, were unresolved, so it also left itself open to a sequel.
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