Walking the Labyrinth
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- ¥800
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- ¥800
発行者による作品情報
Investigating her family history, Molly slips into a world of magic
Backstage at a vaudeville in Oakland, California, a reporter sits down for an interview with Callan Allalie, patriarch of a family of traveling magicians. As the journalist asks his questions, Callan’s sisters dazzle him with tricks too delicate for the stage. The night quickly whirls out of control as all manner of untold magic warps the writer’s mind, and the next morning, he can’t be sure that he witnessed it at all.
Sixty years later, a private detective confronts Molly, the last descendent of the Allalie clan, to ask questions about one of Callan’s sisters, who seemed to vanish after the performance in Oakland. As Molly delves into the mysteries of the Allalies, she discovers a connection to a shadowy organization of nineteenth-century mystics—and a family secret that will change the way she looks at the world forever.
“This marvelous and (in the old sense of the word) fabulous book combines the best qualities of narrative, epistolary and personal journal novels. . . . Walking the Labyrinth is full of enchantments and illusions, wonders and delights, and the mysterious connections of a family. A highly satisfying read!” —Fantasy & Science Fiction
“Walking the Labyrinth [is] a modern morality play that says much about what it means to live, love and learn. Along the way, Goldstein confronts us with bold truths, as well as enchantment.” —Locus
“The writing in this novel is magical, subtle, multi-layered and deep.” —The Palm Beach Post Lisa Goldstein has published ten novels and dozens of short stories under her own name and two fantasy novels under the pseudonym Isabel Glass. Her most recent novel is The Uncertain Places, which won the Mythopoeic Award. Goldstein received the National Book Award for The Red Magician and the Sidewise Award for her short story “Paradise Is a Walled Garden.” Her work has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Some of her stories appear in the collection Travellers in Magic.
Goldstein has worked as a proofreader, library aide, bookseller, and reviewer. She lives with her husband and their overexuberant Labrador retriever, Bonnie, in Oakland, California. Her website is www.brazenhussies.net/goldstein.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Contemporary fantasy isn't Goldstein's forte. Her historical and otherworldly reveries (Summer King, Winter Fool, etc.) can dazzle, but the modern world seems to confound her storytelling in this novel set in today's San Francisco, just as it did in Tourists (1989). Here, odd-job typist Molly Travers is searching for her mysterious ancestors. Through a series of increasingly unlikely coincidences, she learns that she is a descendant of the Allalie clan. Originally adepts of the 19th-century English Order of the Labyrinth, the Allalies migrated in the 1930s to the American vaudeville stage, where they used their assorted extrasensory talents to "change people's lives." Molly's journey takes her on a magical mystery tour, but it's one in which Goldstein fumbles the cards and drops the white rabbit on the floor. Her prose is flat and arhythmic, with the many family diaries and letters that Molly discovers revealing the author's ignorance of Victorian locution. The characters are simple, and the plotting is obvious. There's some charm to Molly's discovery of magic in the everyday world, but it's not enough to make this one of Goldstein's memorable outings. Hopefully her next will forsake our world for a more enchanted one.
