Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Of all the myriad races of thinking creatures in the world, the two that most delight in telling stories are the flesh-and-blood humans and the long-lived, fiery jinn.”

The Hidden Palace (The Golem & The Jinni, #2) by Helene Wecker

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I’m having a hard time reviewing this one, mostly because I had a hard time deciding what I thought about it. But I’m on the verge of getting hopelessly behind in reviews again, so it’s time to buckle down and figure it out. I was thinking about the book this morning and I think I’ve finally formed some solid opinions, so here we go. This is a book about change in all its forms: death (and grief), destruction, creation, evolution, the way a person changes […]

A book I loved years ago is still great on re-read.

The Golem and the Jinni (The Golem and the Jinni, #1) by Helene Wecker

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This was just as good the second time. Not going to do a whole huge review because I’m tired, and I’d rather be reading the sequel instead of writing things. I still think this is an absolutely lovely portrayal of the immigrant experience, both in the way it portrays actual historical immigrant communities (particularly Little Syria and the Jewish communities in NYC) and in the way that Wecker uses the outsized fantastical experiences of the golem and the jinni (Chava and Ahmad, as they become […]

How to not annoy while moralizing with folklore

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I’d seen this book around, and I knew it had gotten some good reviews and won some awards. I wasn’t in much of a rush to get to it, but then I realized it would be a good fit for a final project in a Myth and Folklore in Literature class that I have coming up, starting in about a week, and I’m not about to put a book on a list of options for a final project unless I’ve read it myself. Reading project […]

Once Upon a Time in Old New York

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1899. On a ship bound for New York in the middle of the Atlantic, a Golem comes to life. Soon after, her master and sole reason for living, dies. A little ways across the water, a Jinni turned human emerges from more than a thousand years of captivity in a flask in the shop of a tinsmith in lower Manhattan, thousands of miles away from his home in the Syrian desert. Both are out of time and out of place. Who are they in such […]



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