It’s sumptuous, sensuous and so much fun to read you’ll look forward to immersing yourself in its pages as if it is a vacation destination. Whether you’ve read the first or not (you should!), this is the book you are looking for this summer. Time has passed, and the characters we loved have changed, but they are about to experience the sort of life-changes that leave their mark. The sequel to The Golem and the Jinni has all the charm, inventiveness and undeniable life of the original. Does it matter which century we are talking about? As it happens, Helene Wecker’s The Hidden Palace: A Novel of the Golem and the Jinni takes place some 120 years ago, yet in many ways, Wecker’s genius is to make it feel like home. Spanning the tumultuous years from the turn of the twentieth century to the beginning of World War I, The Hidden Palace follows these lives and others as they collide and interleave.New York, at the turn of the century it’s crowded, confusing, the very definition of culture clash. Back in New York, in a tenement on the Lower East Side, a little girl named Kreindel helps her rabbi father build a golem they name Yossele-not knowing that she’s about to be sent to an orphanage uptown, where the hulking Yossele will become her only friend and protector. There she meets Dima, a tempestuous female jinni who’s been banished from her tribe.

Park Avenue heiress Sophia Winston, whose brief encounter with Ahmad left her with a strange illness that makes her shiver with cold, travels to the Middle East to seek a cure. Brought together under calamitous circumstances, their lives are now entwined-but they’re not yet certain of what they mean to each other.īoth Chava and Ahmad have changed the lives of the people around them.

Fearing they’ll be exposed as monsters, these magical beings hide their true selves and try to pass as human-just two more immigrants in the bustling world of 1900s Manhattan. Ahmad is a jinni, a restless creature of fire, once free to roam the desert but now imprisoned in the shape of a man. In this enthralling historical epic, set in New York City and the Middle East in the years leading to World War I- the long-awaited follow-up to the acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Golem and the Jinni-Helene Wecker revisits her beloved characters Chava and Ahmad as they confront unexpected new challenges in a rapidly changing human world.Ĭhava is a golem, a woman made of clay, who can hear the thoughts and longings of those around her and feels compelled by her nature to help them. “A layered novel of many complex characters…To keep their worlds safe, Chava and Ahmad must access both their greatest supernatural powers and their deepest human impulses.” (Historical Novels Review) An immersive and magical tale of loneliness, love, and finding hope.” (Buzzfeed)

The hidden palace helene wecker review