The Puzzle King
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
This “compelling” novel of three sisters—and the immigrant who invented the jigsaw puzzle—“captures the squalor and bustle of early 20th century New York” (The Miami Herald).
Lively, beautiful Flora was sent to America from Germany by her family to find a better life. Brooding, studious Simon came from Lithuania with the same plan. An improbable match, they meet in New York City and fall in love. Simon—inventor of the first mass-market jigsaw puzzle—eventually makes his fortune. But now that they have achieved wealth, Flora and Simon become obsessed with rescuing those they left behind in Europe.
Inspired by the author’s own family lore, and interweaving the stories of Flora’s two sisters, one the mistress of a wealthy WASP and the other struggling back in the old country, this is “a work of genealogical fiction from the late 19th century to the eve of World War II . . . It balances the Jewish immigrant experience in New York—both the achievement of the American dream and the curdling of it—against the insidious anti-Semitism of Germany and Eastern Europe” (Los Angeles Times).
“Everybody loves an inspiring rags-to-riches story, and The Puzzle King delivers that in spades.” —San Francisco Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carter (Swim to Me) mines her family history in this underwhelming novel that examines the lives and loves of Jewish immigrants in early 20th-century New York. Nine-year-old Simon Phelps is sent by his mother from Lithuania to America, where he grows up poor but ambitious on the Lower East Side. He meets German-born Flora Grossman, and their marriage and ascent into American success forms the linchpin for the familiar tales of immigrants vacillating between the New World and the Old. The interwoven stories of Flora and her sisters Seema, the kept mistress of a WASP banker, and the somber Margot, who endures an austere life in post-WWI Germany highlight the different paths for German-Jewish women. Meanwhile, Simon's booming career in the advertising world is tempered by the grief he feels as he searches for his lost family, though his success enables him to plan a bold mission of salvation. Unfortunately, the narrative, while admirable in scope, feels too beholden to its source material, with the remote, speculative tone making this often feel more like a historian's work than a novelist's.
