In Wecker’s, it’s exactly the opposite, and we find new things to savor on every page. In the wrong hands, it could be torturously boring.

Like its long-lived protagonists, the book takes a slow-burn approach to its plot.

Wecker delights in her own worldbuilding, creating magical rules and natural laws and then twisting them, crafting a story that’s equal parts folktale, fable, and adventure. Across town, a Syrian tinsmith accidentally frees a jinni hundreds of years old who’s equally unaccustomed to the customs of the New World, and is equally uncomfortable with the demands imposed upon him by his own new master. As a golem, she’s supposed to fulfill the wishes of her master - but without a master, she’s confused and directionless, and trying to cope with her arrival in turn-of-the-century New York City. En route to their new life in America, the young man falls sick and dies, and the golem finds herself launched into a world she barely understands. In a European shtetl, a young man pays an old rabbi to create a bride for him - a female golem who will do whatever he says. The book starts with the birth of one of its characters and the rebirth of the other. Both are rare finds in the contemporary book world: elegant, anachronistic stories of magic and miracles in a historical-fiction world more accepting of it than our own, set against a lush narrative voice that’s equally as magical as its characters. It’s going to be hard not to compare Helene Wecker’s first novel, The Golem and the Jinni, to the fantastical (and fantastic) book Jonathan Strange & Mr.

The golem and the jinni review