(This goes less for the fire and more for the sinking ship, for what it’s worth.) If that sounds like the plot here is far more complicated than its predecessor, that’s undeniably true – and I haven’t even touched on a variety of other storylines here, including a young boy’s memories of the climax of the previous book, a standoffish orphan girl with a secret, Ahmad’s prickly relationship with his business partner, Chava’s growing realizations about her own nature and how it will affect her life – oh, and did I mention a slew of historical events, from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire to the sinking of the Titanic? Yeah, there’s a lot going on in The Hidden Palace, and to some degree, it’s to the book’s detriment while The Golem and the Jinni was remarkably tight and focused despite all of its scope (and even tighter than it first looked, given the final revelations), The Hidden Palace struggles a bit more to keep itself together, sometimes forcing its threads together a little inelegantly, or using history in a way that sometimes feels less organic and more like the quick cultural tourism of Forrest Gump. But as the book opens, a rabbi in the neighborhood stumbles across the notes left behind by Chava’s former “keeper,” and realizes what they might mean simultaneously, back in Ahmad’s homeland, a female jinni hears about the legend of the traveling jinni bound by iron who traveled across oceans, and decides to make her way towards him.

The Hidden Palace picks up almost immediately after the end of the first novel (indeed, if you, like me, haven’t read it since its original release, I’d recommend a revisiting before you start this one – while Wecker adds some recapping, this definitely feels like it’s intended almost as a direct follow-up, and works better when all of that is fresh in your mind), as the jinni Ahmad returns home from his travels and the golem Chava awaits him back home. In short, it’s basically a perfect book, one that works excellently on its own…but then, Wecker announced that she had a sequel coming…and who was I to turn down a return trip to this amazing world? It’s something truly special to me, finding something wonderful in the pairing of a creature who is made to serve and one who never wants to serve again, and exploring that both in terms fantastical and deeply grounded.

It’s been eight years since Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni, a wondrous, beautiful work of fiction that took a simple concept – in New York City near the beginning of the 20th century, a golem comes to live among humans in the Jewish quarter, while a jinni freed from centuries of captivity hides in the Syrian neighborhood – and turned it into something special: a tale about immigrants, about culture wars, about unlikely friends, about Jewish mysticism, about revenge and love and friendship and kindness and much more.

The hidden palace helene wecker review