The Golem and the Djinni (The Golem and the Djinni #1) by Helene Wecker
★★★☆☆
Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a strange man who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic. Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire, born in the ancient Syrian Desert. Trapped in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard centuries ago, he is released accidentally by a tinsmith in a Lower Manhattan shop.
Now, I have to say that I really wanted to like this book. I had heard of it a lot and I guess this made me (foolishly) believe that The Golem and the Djinni would be the book that would finally warm me up to Magical Realism. Sadly, that just didn’t happen. It was just interesting enough that I wanted to find out what would happen in the end, but boring enough to wish it would just go faster.
this review is not spoiler free from here on out
The Golem and the Djinni is by no means a piece of poor writing. Objectively speaking it is a good story – the idea is original and lovely and honestly the premise of the book seemed appealing to me. It’s just that somehow I could not muster enough patience to deal with the characters.
So much seems to be left unresolved – Chava’s wondering whether all her characteristics were predetermined by her maker and finding her own way in the world. Ahmad’s impulsive and free nature being reconciled with his imprisonment in a human body. We don’t really see the characters develop as much as they could. Fair enough, we do essentially see Chava grow from a “newborn” to a young woman, but it feels as if she barely changes.
The most infuriating bit for me is the relationship between Chava and Ahmad in itself. I don’t know whether we were meant to perceive it as romantic and wonderful, but essentially they only started meeting up because they were the only two supernatural creatures they knew of in New York. And after having a huge row over their fundamentally incompatible personalities they just decided to make up because ‘wow danger happened and i guess we are in love even though none of the flaws that drove us apart have changed in any way’.
I just felt like the book left no impact on me. For example, when Ahmad steals the command to destroy Chava from her, she reacts so mildly when she finds out it was he who had done it. It just feels like the characters were just trudging along to forward the plot instead of the plot being forwarded by the characters and their development. I feel like the long exposition wearied me as well so I found it hard to get into the actual story.
Even though this review is full of complaints, I did enjoy this book a bit. It is by no means a bad one and a great many people seem to have enjoyed it but I feel like this is not something I would ever revisit or recommend to my friends.
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