I first discovered The Golem and the Jinni last June. Before the start of staff training, I was able to take a few days off to visit some friends in Eugene, Oregon. It was a wonderful getaway where I was able to see close friends again and spend some time alone exploring the city. Solo travel is my favorite type of travel, so I relished the opportunity to wander the streets alone.

Whenever I go to a different city, I like to visit the local bookstores. You can really gain a sense for the character of a place and its values by what booksellers choose to stock and how they design their displays. Large chains are another window into this, but I find that they are but a simulacrum of a local bookstore.

I went to the beautiful Smith Family Bookstore, where large shelves and books stacked on the floor dominate. I was mainly after the sequel to His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novick, which I was nearing the end of during this trip and would proceed to finish on the train ride back home. Whilst wandering the shelves, I was struck by a simple, yet provocative title in the Fantasy section: The Golem and the Jinni. It was an attractive title and the jacket cover promised an interesting read. Alas, if I bought every book that caught my eye that day, I wouldn’t have been able to bring each back in my suitcase. So, I left the title on the shelf, but made sure to add it to my book list.

I store this list in my family’s Amazon account. Partially this is for convenience. Because it is easier for me to refer to, I can easily find the titles and when I am searching for a new read at a bookstore. I mention this because it is my family’s Amazon account and, when my little brother went Christmas shopping for me, he used this list to pick out which book to get and he landed on The Golem and the Jinni. I spent four paragraphs on this story because apparently anecdotes are good for SEO and that means I can put “SEO Optimization” on my LinkedIn and resume as I cannibalize every action that I take for presenting myself to employers.

This review will be broken up into two sections. In the first, I will give a spoiler-free review of the book. Because I consider blurbs to be spoiler-free, I won’t stray to details or specifics beyond what is shared in those three paragraphs. At the end of the spoiler-free section, I will present a very brief note on whether I recommend the book or not and why. From there, I will go more in-depth and talk about how the novel lived up to the promise of the blurb and elaborate on the motivations underpinning my recommendation. At the very end, I will present the book with a number of astronomical bodies corresponding to the Likert scale.

Spoiler-Free Review of The Golem and the Jinni

The jacket cover gives away most of the action that takes place in the story and provides a very broad outline for how the story progresses. In 1899, a Golem is created to be the wife of a furniture salesman in Poland before he moves to New York. Cautioned by the creator to wait until New York to wake the creation, the man waits for most of the trip but is, alas, unable to wait and awakens the Golem aboard the ship.

He promptly dies of a burst appendix and the Golem is masterless and barraged by the desires of everyone aboard the ship before she arrives to Ellis Island, where she jumps overboard and wanders through New York City until discovered by a kindly Rabbi who offers to teach her how to adjust to her new life. She eventually learns to block out the thoughts and desires she hears and takes up a job at a bakery. Due to her mystical nature, she has no need to sleep or eat and spends her nights in a tenement bored out of her mind.

Blocks away in Little Syria, a tinsmith is given a battered oil lamp to repair. When he erases the intricate design on the lamp, a Jinni is released, unable to remember how he entered the lamp and distraught to discover that hundreds of years, and thousands of miles, have passed between his last recollections and the modern day. The tinsmith offers to house and employ the Jinni, who reluctantly accepts. Soon, the Jinni’s wandering soul leads to him living a double-life. By day, he is an artisan tinsmith in Little Syria. By night, he wanders and explores the streets of New York City.

On one fateful night, the Golem wanders the streets whilst distraught when she runs into a man whose desires she can not read. After this chance encounter, the Jinni offers to show the Golem the places he’s discovered throughout the city. They join in an unlikely friendship and their conflicting natures often come into conflict. The Jinni yearns for the freedom he had before he was bound to the lamp. The Golem is a creature created to serve but is masterless.

After weeks of meeting one night each week, a sobering incident results in the two breaking off their arrangement until “a powerful menace” forces them back together to save their existence.

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The bulk of the novel is focused on the daily lives of the Golem and of the Jinni, with side stories featuring seemingly inconsequential characters woven throughout the narrative. The book can be slow in some places and some lines are stronger than others. While I enjoyed seeing the lives of the two main characters through the vantage point of these side characters, I found myself often wishing Wecker to return to the main lines and bring us to that promised meeting. Once we got to that point, the pace increased to a more enjoyable point until the aforementioned incident that caused the Golem and the Jinni to part. Until the reveal, the story seemed to drag once again, only to accelerate in pace to a satisfying conclusion.

If you’re planning on checking out this book, I would recommend you do so. This is not an action-oriented story and Wecker takes her time to weave the threads together, focusing more on developing her characters rather than the plot. Large swaths of the book are dedicated to how the Golem and the Jinni attempt to live an ordinary life and Wecker creates a believable replica of turn-of-the-century New York City that is as developed as any of the characters.

Spoilerful Review

From here on, this review will contain major spoilers beyond that described on the jacket cover. Readers are advised to continue at their own risk.

Does The Golem and the Jinni keep its promise?

It’s a tired cliché at this point that books have covers because they are meant to be judged. Let’s be honest here: HarperCollins has teams of people dedicated to selecting, editing, publishing, and marketing books. They likely spent a pretty penny on designing the cover and crafting the blurb to reach its maximum audience. When I add a book to my list, it is either based off of a recommendation or it was an organic discovery that interested me. Either way, I will always read the blurb provided by the publisher to make sure I am not wasting my time on something I wouldn’t enjoy reading. This blurb is like the book’s job application or elevator pitch. You get 10-15 seconds to convince me to take a chance on you, you better make it a good one.

The publisher chose to end its pitch by describing the book as “marvelous and compulsively readable” and, in the place above their own blurb chose a review that called it “a delightful blend of the prosaic and the fanciful.” I think that the review, written by Deborah Harkness, is more accurate than the publisher’s final attempt at selling this book.

Wecker’s setting and characters are well-written, and she masterfully weaves the mundanity of life with the fantastic elements she introduces. Despite the Golem and the Jinni being fantastical creatures, their lives are shockingly realistic. Chava, the name the Golem chooses, works at a Jewish bakery, and is caught up in the lives of those around her. When the Rabbi dies midway through the book, her pain and anguish feels real, and we see the strain that losing the one person in her life who knew what she really is causes her.

Similarly, Ahmad’s desire to regain some semblance of the freedom he once had provides an engrossing context for his conflicts with the tinsmith about his escapades throughout New York. These escapades are where Wecker really shines. While I enjoyed the moments where the Golem and the Jinni were together and the background for the Jinni’s imprisonment more, Wecker’s research shines through as she describes the streets of New York pre-automobile and the disparate ways that people lived in the city. The way she contrasts the lives of the Winstons of Fifth Avenue, the Arabs of Little Syria, and the Jews of the Lower Eastside is a highlight of this facet of the book.

That being said, I did not find the book to be “compulsively readable.” Parts of it, such as Ahmad’s explorations of New York and the side tangents into the lives of people like Saleh (an ice-cream man who used to be a doctor before coming to America after being possessed) and Michael Levy (the Rabbi’s nephew and only surviving family member who works at a sheltering house for new Jewish immigrants) dragged on and their inclusion didn’t pay off until much latter in the book. Once Wecker established the titular characters, all I wanted was for her to put them together and explore how they interact. When they did interact, it was almost everything that I wanted, but I felt that Wecker could have played up the immigrant metaphor more than she did.

The blurb and reviews also played up the impact of the “adversary” that the Golem and the Jinni face in the book’s conclusion, but Schaalman’s adversarial nature is only made apparent in the last 100 pages of the book and by then I had forgotten that this was the novel’s promised conflict. While his life in Poland and immigration to New York is a major thread throughout the book, I found it less enjoyable than the mystery of the Jinni’s capture and thought it to be another of the tangents like Sophia Winston’s miscarriage or Saleh’s possession.

Plot

Whereas before I gripped about the novel’s pacing and disparate threads, here I will say that I actually did enjoy the plot of the novel. The side threads all seemed like they were disparate and only included because they involved individuals whose lives were affected by the titular characters, but Wecker is able to tie them together to a satisfying conclusion in the last one-hundred pages. That last fifth of the novel was brilliant and “compulsively readable.”

At its heart, The Golem and the Jinni is a love story about two people who, despite their differences, cannot escape the gravity that ties them together. Everything in this book is carefully orchestrated to heighten this gravity, even at the expense of pacing. The constant tangential sections are important to the overall narrative, but they add more shifting away from the main plot and made it easy for me to lose interest. This makes long periods of the novel feel unfocused and unsatisfying to read, but, on balance, those last 100 pages make up for the meandering path it took to get there.

I don’t think there is any way for Wecker to have improved the pacing problem without sacrificing integral parts of the story. If she gave us all of Ahmad’s backstory from the start, then the reveal that Schaalman is the reincarnation of the wizard who trapped him would have not been so satisfying and have felt contrived rather than cosmic. If we didn’t learn that Sophia Winston, the young woman Ahmad slept with multiple times in a “Peter visiting Wendy” fashion, was pregnant, miscarried, and was permanently sickened because of it, then her involvement in Ahmad’s rescue after he attempted to extinguish himself in Central Park would have been far less satisfying and her observation of Chava’s love for him less meaningful.

It’s because of the necessity of the tangents that I struggle to rate the plot. It was well crafted, but far too slow in the middle. Every moment contributed to the conclusion, but they were a slog to get through at times. The last 100 pages were impossible to put down, but the rest was easy to ignore for days at a time. But I don’t see another way Wecker could have told this story than with the path she chose.

Characters

I mentioned in the spoiler-free section that the characters are the strongest part of the novel and that is because Wecker takes her time, as painfully slow as it may be, to develop them. Every character, the mute Matthew and the job giving Radzins are as believable as the titular characters. Although I often wished we would return to the direct story of the Golem and the Jinni, I did enjoy the time we spent with those whose lives were impacted by the two.

On the Golem’s side, we learn much more about the characters she interacts with daily because her main struggle is her ability to read people’s thoughts and desires. After her master dies, Chava is unable to cope with this ability and the torrent of desires everyone has. It saves her from discovery on the ship, but it immediately gets her into trouble in the Jewish Quarter and it is a long and painful process as the Rabbi teaches her how to control herself and ignore people’s desires the best she can. We can easily see the immigration metaphor in Chava’s arc. Even her fear of being discovered and destroyed like the golems are in the old stories is reminiscent of the immigrant plight to assimilate lest they be expelled.

Of the characters on her side, my favorites are the Rabbi and Yehudah Schaalman. While Anna, the Radzins, and Michael Levy are given development arcs of their own, the two mystics were by far my favorite subplots. In the Rabbi, we see an old man’s struggle with the younger generations assimilating by neglecting the old ways. Perhaps it is my degree in Religious Studies, but I found myself fascinated by the realism in the Rabbi’s struggle with his nephew over keeping the old traditions alive. When he dies, we then see the other side of this as his nephew wishes he would have visited more and that they could have reconciled before it was too late.

In Schaalman, Wecker builds an intriguing villain. I forgot that the blurb promised an adversary, so the reveal that Schaalman was the reincarnation of the wizard who trapped Ahmad came as a pleasant surprise. Schaalman was a great villain because, while he was somewhat of a mustache-twirler, he hid his true nature from the characters as best he could. When he finally drops the pretenses, he revels in his lack of scruples and is a brilliant tormenter of the titular characters. Of course, it is this lack of scruples that became his undoing in a climax that had me moving the book closer in an attempt to read faster.

On Ahmad’s side of the story, we rely more on point-of-view switching in order to expand on the characters. I found this to be rather slow and it was often during or after these segments that I put the story down for a while. While the tinsmith and the coffeehouse owners are integral to the plot, I found them to be boring. Arbeely, the tinsmith, often frets that Ahmad will reveal his true nature and, after the Jinni begins exploring New York, loses much of his characterization. Similarly, the coffeehouse owners are bit players that could have been far less focused on and still had the same effect on the story.

The saving grace for his side of the story is in the character of Sophia Winston. Sophia is a wealthy socialite who wishes to travel instead of being forced to marry and settle into a life of hosting parties. It’s a classic setup, but I loved how Wecker twisted it. After a tryst with Ahmad, Sophia becomes pregnant. She is unaware of this until, during a trip to Europe with her mother before she is to be married, she notices the warmth coming from her womb and realizes it has been months since her last period.

When she miscarries midway through the trip, she finds that her body had gotten used to the heat and she is now far sicklier and paler. She spends her days after returning to New York sitting in front of fires, despite the heat outside, in an attempt to warm herself. She spends her days reading her father’s travel journals and wishing that she didn’t have to marry. When the Golem bursts in one morning with a nearly dead Ahmad, Sophia takes control of the situation and is able to compel her parents and servants to welcome Ahmad, the Golem, and the ragged man with them who can only speak Arabic. Because of the indecency of this incident, Sophia is able to have her wedding called off and is allowed to travel the world.

I should also talk of this ragged man. Saleh is an ice cream man who is unable to look anyone in the eyes. In a flashback, we learn that he used to be a respected doctor in Syria. One day, he has a patient who everyone claims must be possessed. Not believing in such silly things, Saleh treats her for seizures. For the crime of being wrong genre savvy, Saleh is subsequently possessed and has his life ruined. He immigrates to America in an attempt to escape the shame of being the ruined doctor and lives on the streets of Little Syria, where he sells ice cream.

Due to his possession, Saleh is unable to look anyone in the face without seeing their faces rotten as if they were long dead. That is until one day he sees a burning man and learns of Ahmad’s secret. He still distrusts Ahmad, but grows to respect him and, eventually, is cured by Schaalman in an attempt to learn where Ahmad is. Knowing that Schaalman means to do Ahmad harm, he tries to find Ahmad and ends up saving Ahmad’s life as the latter tried to extinguish himself in a Central Park fountain. In the climax, Saleh gives his life to trap Schaalman in the lamp meant to contain Ahmad.

And that brings us to the other titular character. The Jinni is known as Ahmad after he is released from the lamp by Arbeely, a middling tinsmith in Little Syria who barely makes enough money to keep his shop open. After convincing the Jinni that he was not responsible for his current state, the two enter into a partnership. The Jinni is, by nature of being made of fire, able to reshape metals with just his hands. He can accomplish tasks that would take Arbeely days to finish and greatly increases the profitability of the venture.

Immediately, the two come into ideological conflict: Arbeely is content with the mundanity of life in the shop, but Ahmad longs for the days when he could roam freely. Throughout the novel, we get glimpses of Ahmad’s old life in the Syrian desert. He danced with the winds, wandered the desert as he pleased, built a castle of glass, and toyed with the Bedouin nomads: a large distance from living in a one-room tenement and spending most of the day fixing pots and pans.

His arc in the novel is centered around accepting his new lot in life. He builds lots relationships in Little Syria and New York, but they are all broken when he and the Golem part ways. He grows even more restless, unable to understand why he cannot get Chava out of his mind, and eventually decides to leave Little Syria and live as he pleases. Of course, this is when Schaalman catches up with him and he regains his memories.

Seeing what caused him to become like this and understanding that Schaalman would do much the same to the Golem, the Jinni attempts to take his own life to allow Chava to be free. But he is rescued by Chava and Saleh, and they get him to agree to their plot to escape New York by entering the lamp and being tossed in the sands of the Syrian desert. This goes horribly wrong when Schaalman retakes control of Ahmad, uses a spell the Rabbi made to turn Chava into his thrall, and plans to use the two to ensure his immortality. Luckily, Saleh is able to trap Schaalman in the lamp and allows the Golem and the Jinni to be free once more.

In the epilogue, we see Ahmad deliver the lamp to his kin in the Syrian desert and ask if they could break the bond placed on him. They are unable to, but take the lamp for safekeeping until Ahmad dies. In New York, Chava receives a telegram from Ahmad. In it, he promises to return and asks her to see if Arbeely will give him his old job back. This is a perfect conclusion to his arc because it shows growth, but recognizes that restlessness is inherent to his character. He and Chava will never be able to have an ordinary life, but both accept this and try to be together anyway.

Discretionary Curve Points

You can think of this category as the kitchen sink of the review. My final rating is an average of the sections, and this is where I can either boost or lower the rating through the fiat that is “I know a good book when I read one.”

Despite my plot-based misgivings, I enjoyed the read. Wecker took her time to tell the story, and I cannot underpin just how enjoyable the last 100 pages were. The way everything had to come together to allow the Golem and the Jinni to live their lives free of Schaalman makes the meandering path worth it and the epilogue was beautiful. The titular characters do not end the story living happily ever after or even happily for now. They do not get together in the end, but their story is not over, and they have the new challenge of learning to live together with their disparate natures. Because of this, I will add 5 stars to the average.

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