The Curse of Pietro Houdini by Derek B. Miller

 

This is a really, really good novel--not as light and breezy as some of Miller's others, nor quite so quippy, but at least as good. All the rage, Jewish and otherwise, that lurked somewhere in the middle-background or further back is front and center, here. The novel has real, interesting things to say about war and art, and about religion and gender and sexuality and identity (in all its meanings). Most of the events in the novel happened to someone, if not the characters in the novel, which ... makes much of the novel hard to cope with.