{"id":1833,"date":"2013-12-01T19:02:28","date_gmt":"2013-12-02T03:02:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1833"},"modified":"2013-12-01T19:02:28","modified_gmt":"2013-12-02T03:02:28","slug":"review-the-golem-and-the-jinni","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1833","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Golem And The Jinni"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I quite enjoyed Helene Wecker&#8217;s <em>Golem and the Jinni<\/em>. It&#8217;s a light fantasy set in the ghettoes of New York City in the late 1800&#8217;s wherein events conspire to loose a Jinni an an unbound Golem on the world. Wecker does a particularly good job of showing the reader both the city and the human condition through the eyes of her two fictional fish out of water.\u00a0 There is something of a buddy-cop sound to the description: the Golem is tuned to people&#8217;s needs and lives to serve others while the Jinni is a swashbuckler who poorly understands consequences.\u00a0 They do learn some of the expected lessons, but as with much of the book the execution elevates the tale.<\/p>\n<p>The plot is well-constructed and detailed without being overly intricate, but my favorite parts were the introduction and set-up.\u00a0 Wecker spends quite a bit of time introducing her protagonists and then introducing them to the city, doting on characters whose role in the plot is fairly minor.\u00a0 This is a strength of the book.\u00a0 I enjoyed watching these characters grope their way into the 1890&#8217;s and into human society by extension.\u00a0 Each is reasonably realized, even when their incompleteness is intentional.\u00a0 It is fun to see what they will do next, even without a driving plot.<\/p>\n<p>The driving plot does arrive, wrongs are righted, old grudges worked out, characters redeemed &#8211; all the fantasy tropes.\u00a0 That&#8217;s all executed competently.\u00a0 I enjoyed watching it, but wasn&#8217;t gripped by it in the way I might be in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/BBC\/mouldering07.html#m07-e\">Cornwell<\/a> tale.\u00a0 I did come away wondering how the characters would react to all the derring-do, and that&#8217;s at least as interesting for me.<\/p>\n<p>Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I quite enjoyed Helene Wecker&#8217;s Golem and the Jinni. It&#8217;s a light fantasy set in the ghettoes of New York City in the late 1800&#8217;s wherein events conspire to loose a Jinni an an unbound Golem on the world. Wecker does a particularly good job of showing the reader both the city and the human [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1833"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1835,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions\/1835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}