This historical intrusion fantasy is about a golem without a master created in the form of a woman and a jinni imprisoned in human form both ending up in New York City in the early twentieth century. Their lives intersect and overlap as they each struggle with the freedom and confinement of their new ways of being. For a golem, this is more freedom than she could imagine—or know what to do with. But for a jinni, this is a life of horrifying captivity... even though he can do as much, if not more, than what any human can do.

I enjoyed the book but did not love it, though I can see why many others may have loved it. Where it really work is in Wecker's depiction of the immigrant communities of gaslight-era New York, and in the two central characters. There are a lot of great observations, both large and small, of the people and their world. Good character moments, good complications, interesting interactions.

But I did find that at times the backstory of the jinni was delved into more than I was actually interested in, threatening to overwhelm the present-day material that had actually hooked me on the story. The core idea of the title sometimes felt a bit lost in at all.

This book was quite excellent, and I could see myself recommending it a fair bit in the future. It is as close to a work of "pure fiction" as I have read in recent times, and reflecting on it brings to mind the aspects of Murakami and Marquez that I most appreciated. Perhaps the story's only shortcoming is that it takes too few risks - the book is not overly surprising, and could have certainly done with a stronger, more driving plot. It also has an ending that, while not weak, does not amaze the way one might expect given the buildup. In spite of all of this, the book gets full marks because it effectively conveys "wonder" - something that books are often hard pressed to do. It keeps you turning the pages more out of a growing desire to understand more and to watch the characters develop than to understand where the plot is going - the kind of book that you wish could go on forever (or, perhaps, be reality).

Overall highly recommended to fiction buffs, those who like old New York, or fans of "classic" literary excellence. ( )

I wanted to give this four stars because it was really well written. However, I could not because it was a bit too angsty for my taste. ( )

A very unique book. I loved the fairy/folk tale feel of the book and learned much about these tales in Jewish and Middle Eastern culture. Yet the book was so much more than a magical story; it was about finding your place in this world and the importance of free will. I loved Chava and her journey to find her humanity. ( )

I loved this book. Wecker is a master of nuance and the telling detail.

I completely fell in love with the flawed, heart-achingly complex characters of Chava and Ahmed. Wecker's beautiful writing made all the characters deliciously fascinating, and the setting was so vivid, every time I set the book down, I felt disoriented. I honestly feel like I have been living in the old Jewish and Syrian neighborhoods of turn of the century New York.

I hated for it to end, but it did. And it ended in a way that, unlike so many recent books, did not fizzle or disappoint. Five stars.
( )

The Golem and the Jinni goes on and on and on. A lot of the story could have been edited out and still have had a long story. Three stars were given to this book because it left the reader wanting it to end already. ( )

In middle and high school there were book reports that we'd have to present in front of the class. Every time the straight-A honor students would recite a passionless checklist of all of the required beats expected from them on the rubric. The class was divided in between those who didn't read the book and those who read the words but couldn't care less about the meaning. But the latter category could fake enthusiasm enough to earn perfect grades every time. Meanwhile my impassioned and overlong screed against an esoteric and probably half-imagined theme in the book got me a trip to the principal's office. It was maddening. To this day I can still hear the insincere tone, the forced meter and timbre in the voices of those top students and it makes me cringe.
I mention this because The Golem and the Jinni reads like middle school. There was nothing wrong with it in a technical sense, as though the author were given a rubric and a set of instructions and dutifully hit every one. But it used the same plodding, uninspired, and inartistic tone throughout the entire book. The voice didn't change or modulate between different characters, it didn’t convey the excitement or the fear of the fantasy, or the loneliness of the characters. I've read authors who deliberately eschew impassioned or evocative language in order to convey the numbness of their characters. But Wecker clearly wasn't going for something like that. Something is rotten when you describe a genie creating a glass castle out of the desert sands using the same language as a shopping list.
Abigail Nussbaum’s review in Strange Horizons makes some excellent points: Wecker wrote a vapid historical fiction and then a vapid fantasy and then accidentally left the blender on. ( )

I finally read this after it had been talked up to me by friends for years. I may be one of the few people who didn't really think it was that great of a read. I don't know exactly what I didn't like because the characters were well developed and the author clearly has a lot of knowledge of NY in that time period, but at the end of the day it wasn't my cup of tea. ( )

I was thrilled with the sample for this book. It hooked me from the beginning, had a lovely, literary voice, and the characters seemed to come to life before me. Unfortunately, that same literary quality that I loved so much made the book fall apart for me in the later chapters. It felt slow and self-indulgent at times, and there were dozens of pages upon pages where nothing happened. The story became tedious, and I had to force myself to finish. It's such a shame, because I adore fantasy, and the occasional literary novel. I thought combining the two was brilliant. It's just too bad it couldn't hold my interest. ( )

I love love loved this book. It's about a (Jewish) golem and an (Arab) jinni (genie) who meet in turn of the century NYC. It's beautifully written and full of historical detail. The various backstories of the main characters wind loosely around each other and get connected and intertwined bit by bit until the story comes to a climax. I was so sad for this book to end! ( )

This is the slowest novel I've read in a long time.
I liked following the lives of the protagonists but I couldn't stand waiting endlessly for the obvious to happen.
This is the reason I dropped the book. I got sick and tired of waiting for the plot, which is obviously being set up, to happen. I would've loved reading the same world, same protagonists but without this painfully slow plot.
I haven't actually seen much of the plot itself yet but the basic setup is incredibly obvious and I found the suspense very tiring beyond a certain point.
It felt like dying of thirst while only being able to drink through an absurdly thin straw.

The main bad guy was introduced early on and revealed as the antagonist sometime later, but up to the 50% mark there didn't actually happen ANYTHING. We know who he is, we know what he wants, and a few very cheap plot conveniences have been put in place early on to provide him with the means. I've listened to 10 hours of very enjoyable nothing but I am not willing to wait another 8 hours for the plot to finally happen.

Something I loved about this book is how things are complicated. This is something most books I've read fail at miserably and which is one of the main reasons a lot of writing appears so cheap and clichéed.
Even if the only way of saving the universe is to accomplish some impossible task, things just seem too simple, too neat most of the time.
The world is messy and convoluted. Things just don't align nicely.
On one hand, this book nails this in regards to the cast and their individual backstories but on the other hand, it very much fails at this exact hurdle in regards to the actual plot.

The protagonists are complex and flawed enough to be interesting and the author managed to give an amazing sense of time and place.

I enjoyed the various philosophical discussions that characters had with each other and the author had with the reader or whatnot.

Maybe I am just damaged by the fast-food of fantasy I'm reading most of the time. ( )

My actual rating is a 3.5. Entertaining, and I would like to know what happens next. I had trouble liking the Golem. ( )

The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker’s debut novel, earned a Nebula nomination but missed out on the Hugos in a tough year. Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice was a lock, and there were two popular fantasy novels in the running: Wheel of Time and Warbound. A sequel to G and J did not appear until 2021.
The first novel is set in 19th-century New York and features the two title creatures cast adrift in the big city without masters to tell them what to do. It is not exactly a heaven-blessed romance, but it is an intriguing magical take on the Lower Manhattan immigrant story.
Wecker’s plot is more complicated than necessary, but I do admire the clarity of her prose. Her history is well-researched, and her storytelling reminds me of Rothfuss at his best. ( )

Solid fantasy book with a fun style and good characters. I liked the ending although there were many ways it could have gone that I would have been happy with. ( )

The Golem and the Jinni is immensely readable. The research for Jews living in New York City is fascinating although one wonders about the accuracy. For instance, when a character asks rabbi about volunteering, the thrilled rabbi described the virtues of their congregation and how they fought against secularism and unhealthy modern influence. Congregations began allowing snuff during sermons. I hadn't realized in the orthodox world a woman is forbidden for initiating sex as the golem did with her husband Michael. Atheist Michael runs a Jewish type shelter and when discovers he is married to a Golem questions his non-belief in God. If A golem could exist, there must be a god. The last section of the book becomes convoluted and takes a good deal of acceptance by the reader in search of logic. You do end up caring about the Golem and Jinni and maybe that’s enough to get you through this page turner. ( )

I was not sure whether I would enjoy this book - I usually become bored with books that have a slow meandering pace. However, I can truly say that I thoroughly enjoyed it from beginning to end.

I did not particularly get the deeper symbolic meanings from the book that others seem to have got, I didn't find myself questioning the meaning of life - what I got was a great story, told by a great story teller.

I was amazed to discover this was a debut novel! The atmosphere created here is remarkable. The tale slowly twists through centuries and continents, we relate to and care about the characters, and I truly didn't want the story to end.

If you enjoy a great story, beautifully told and described, then read this - you will love it. ( )

This was a lovely exploration of the immigrant narrative rewritten through the eyes of mythical creatures. The Jewish immigrants in NYC bring a golem, stalwart, stoic and short-lived. The Syrians ring a jinni, tempestuous, emotional and millenia old. The golem is masterless and wishes for a master, while the jinni is enslaved and wants to be free. They fight crime! Okay, not literally, but they do defeat an evil rabbi and exorcise an ice cream vendor. It's delightful and speculative fiction at its best: using the metaphor of the supernatural to explore the bounds of our wordl ( )

A realistic fantasy about two supernatural beings with very different origins (one with a long history and the other with none at all) finding themselves adrift in the Lower East Side of New York around the turn of the 20th century. How they learn to exist in human society without revealing their true natures, how they eventually find one another, and how they ultimately avoid destruction when it seems inevitable, make a wonderfully engaging tale. The historical setting is irresistible, the characters fascinating, and the storytelling would have kept Scheherazade alive for a long, long time. ( )

Different, fresh take on fantasy. Not the typical dragon or vampire or enlightened youth story. I found myself actually caring about the characters (rare, these days when I read modern fiction). The author obviously spent a lot of time developing each main character before she wrote the book.

The final climax seems a bit rushed and contrived, but endings are problematical at any rate. An enjoyable read. I wholeheartedly recommend it! ( )

I respect books and movies that deliver what they advertise. For instance, the movie Hobo with a Shotgun featured a hobo with a shotgun. I would have been pretty disappointed if the hobo had shown up with a machete, or if Rutger Hauer had not, in fact, been a hobo. The Golem and the Jinni served up both in the first two chapters.

Aside from that, this book was also a mashup of Fantasy and Historical Fiction. Two genres that don't usually intersect. The mythology was detailed and the depiction of life in 1899 New York City seemed legit. The writing was clean and the characters were well developed. My favorite was "Ice Cream Saleh."

You can't ask for much more from a book and I loved the ending. After languishing on my TBR list for five years, a sequel came out this year and that was the clincher for me to read it.

If you like mythology set in modern(ish) times, then you'll like this book. If you despise Golems and/or Jinnis...well...you have been warned. ( )

Decent enough read. Could have been 50 pages shorter though. ( )

not what i expected. it was better. a slow burn. but what lovely flames. ( )

Read maybe 3 of the 20 hours, so 15%, but I'm going to let it go.

Starts off interesting but it isn't what I thought it was. It isn't the story of a Golem and a Jinni. It's the story of a Jewish woman and an Arabic man, immigrants in NYC in the late 1800s. Metaphors, literature, history.... It's well liked but it's not what I am currently looking to get lost in.

This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: Probably. I’d even consider continuing it in audio if I were looking for more audiobooks to listen to.

Audio Narration
The narrator is George Guidall. For my tastes, he was perfect. He was easy to understand, and he completely faded into the background. I never once thought about his performance, either good or bad, until I sat down to write this review. That’s exactly what I like, and what I rarely get – I don’t want to be distracted by the narrator, I just want to focus on the story. At no point did I feel like he was using the wrong tone for the story, nor did I ever get confused or annoyed by his character voices.

Story
This is a somewhat meandering fantasy story about a variety of characters, all centering around the two titular characters – a golem and a jinni. The golem was created in the form of a woman to serve as a wife for a man who had plenty of money but lacked personality. She’s bound to serve him, but something happens early on in the story to leave her without any master, free to make her own way in the world. The jinni, on the other hand, was enslaved in a flask that was passed down as a family heirloom for hundreds of years, with nobody having had any idea that the jinni was there or that such creatures could even exist. Then he accidentally gets released. We also learn the backstories of a variety of other characters whose lives affected the main characters in some way. It all weaves together into a fairly cohesive story by the end. The golem and the jinni find themselves in New York around the late 1800s/early 1900s, which is where the majority of the story is set.

For the first half of the book, the plot felt more like it was driven by the backstories than anything else, with a larger picture slowly forming to show how all these stories fit together. The action focusing on the golem and the jinni in their current state was more slice-of-life type stuff as they learned about their surroundings, found ways to deal with their situation, and searched for purpose and happiness while being surrounded by humans who couldn’t possibly understand them. I think it was getting close to the halfway point in the book before the two even met. Toward the end, though, the story does start to take off with some more immediate action affecting the characters in their present day.

I can look at it objectively and say the story is pretty slow, but I don’t think I was ever once bored by it. I was interested in the backstories as well as in the characters’ attempts to integrate into society. The golem and the jinni both had personalities that were somewhat opposite extremes of each other, and as such I didn’t relate much to either of them, but I still liked them and cared about what happened to them. Some of the secondary characters were quite interesting too.

The magic side of things isn’t very clearly defined. Some of the abilities of the characters, and the side effects of their abilities, don’t stand up to much scrutiny. For the most part I was able to suspend disbelief and just enjoy the fantasy story. The one thing that constantly niggled at me though was the jinni’s memory loss. It was just too convenient, with his memories cutting off at the perfect point to leave him completely clueless as to what happened and allow the author to slowly reveal his story to the reader. Even by the end when we understood the jinni’s enslavement better, I never saw a logical explanation for the memory loss. Especially since his memories conveniently cut off long before he met the wizard who enslaved him.

This story comes to a satisfying conclusion, although it did feel a little rushed or forced or something. I think it’s just one of those cases where a story meanders so much that it can be a little jarring if that story suddenly starts racing toward a conclusion at the end. I wanted the end to be drawn out with a little more detail. I was actually surprised the golem and the jinni were both in somewhat hopeful circumstances by the end. Not all their problems were solved, but one could imagine that some better resolutions could be found in time. There was so much dark foreshadowing throughout the story, that I really expected one or both characters to sacrifice themselves by the end. It wasn’t until they actually attempted to do so and failed that I realized the story probably wasn’t going to go that way after all.

I don’t know if there’s a plan for how many books this series might have, but I’d definitely like to revisit it if at some point in the future it seems to be complete. The story has a lot of depth to it, but it’s also a very simple story to follow. For that reason, it made a particularly good audio listen. I always feel like my comprehension and retention is better with print than audio, but I didn’t feel that gap as strongly with this book as I usually do with others. I could see myself coming back to this in either print or audio format, at least if they keep the same narrator. ( )

I liked this, but struggled to finish it. The smaller aspects of the story captured me, but it was the millennia spanning aspects that consumed the back half of the book, so I just fell off. ( )