Tuesday, July 29, 2014

80:120 The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

A golem, a being out of Jewish folklore made out of clay and brought to live by magic, is created for a man to be his wife when he moves to NY.  He wakes her on the way but dies almost immediately after leaving her as a newborn to find her way on her own.  In order to know what her master wants, she can feel desires and wants in others which leads to many problems as she arrives with no master or idea of what to do with herself.  Thankfully, she is found by a kind rabbi who works to help her grow into as fully realized a person as she can be.

Over in the Middle Eastern area of NY, a woman takes a flask to the local metalsmith to be repaired when to his surprise, a jinn emerges from it.  The jinn has been imprisoned for hundreds of years with no idea how he came to be in the flask or trapped in human form.  He chafes at the human rules he is forced to follow and starts sneaking out to explore the city.  On one of these excursions, he finds the golem, a creature that is not like himself but is not human but living in human society and a friendship of sorts is born.  Unfortunately, there is more connecting them than either of them can possibly know but those things will test them beyond anything they could imagine.

There weren't any major surprises for me in this story.  I got pretty much exactly the story I was expecting but despite the fact that it was fairly predictable, it was beautifully told and wonderfully executed.

Page count: 486p/19,988p ytd/201,026p lifetime

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