This set him up nicely for his revelation toward the end of the book – when he finally remembered what had happened before he was captured. She opened his eyes to the people around him. But when Ahmad got to know Chava, he started to realize that her caution and care for others might not be completely unfounded. He was simply doing what he had to do to bide his time until he could escape his imprisonment (in a human body). Ahmad saw himself as something greater than humans and had no real desire to fit into human life. He was concerned mostly about himself and what would make him happy, not really evaluating how his actions affected others. Ahmad was a perfect counterbalance to Chava. Chava didn’t even know if they should accept her – after all, her fears were real. You could feel her breaking out of her shell and you wanted her to experience that more! Chava’s situation was sometimes incredibly sad, and I longed for her to find happiness in a world that might not ever be able to accept her.

But this just made her truly joyful moments that much more impactful because you knew how much they actually meant to her. Chava was always very aware of her limitations and she was extremely cautious. I felt horrible for her – living her life in constant fear of doing something wrong, of alerting people to her “otherness” or of reverting to her baser nature and actually hurting someone. Chava, the Golem, was definitely my favorite character in this book. I especially loved how she wove Ahmad’s history into the book – we learned more and more about how he ended up being captured as the book went on, until the story was fully revealed near the end of the book. I was honestly a bit worried – until I started to see how Wecker wove these characters’ stories together in ways that surprised and fascinated me. Like I said, the book wandered a bit, giving us descriptions of seemingly random characters’ lives. Marvelous and compulsively readable, Helene Wecker's debut novel The Golem and the Jinni weaves strands of Yiddish and Middle Eastern literature, historical fiction and magical fable, into a wondrously inventive and unforgettable tale. Chava is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899.Īhmad is a jinni, a being of fire born in the ancient Syrian desert, trapped in an old copper flask, and released in New York City, though still not entirely free.Īhmad and Chava become unlikely friends and soul mates with a mystical connection. In The Golem and the Jinni, a chance meeting between mythical beings takes readers on a dazzling journey through cultures in turn-of-the-century New York.Ĭhava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic and dies at sea on the voyage from Poland. Genres: Fantasy, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction

The golem and the jinni book review