The Puzzle King

I adored this book. I thought that the characters were all well-depicted and very engaging. The story moved along at an appropriate pace. In recent years, I have not read many books about immigrants, but this one reminded me of their poignancy and emotional pull. I would highly recommend this book. I was suprised to see that it only had a handful of reviews.

I loved this book. It is partly a beautifully drawn immigration tale. I really enjoyed seeing 1900s New York through these characters' eyes. It is also an it-stinks-to-be-a-jew-in-Germany-in-1936 book, which I thought had already been covered pretty well-- but this book is so much more than that. The characters aren't sketches of fearful jews, under the gun. Some of them are downright ambivalent about leaving Germany. The conflict between 1930s fear and the joys of every day life are captured well. I can't wait to look up other books by this author...

Thanks to the gift of her imagination, Betsy Carter has turned a tale from her own history into a fully-faceted story of family devotion spanning two continents and forty years. Lovers of historical novels, especially those that explore the immigrant experience and the years leading up to the Holocuast, will be drawn in by the rich detail of Carter's research, particularly as she brings to life the everyday world of a boy who arrives in the United States alone and lonely, yet through talent and grit, turns himself into "the puzzle king." This boy, in fact, has been modeled after Carter's own great-uncle. This is a subtle yet powerful book, with likable characters who respoect one another and rarely shout--even when, say, their sister may be endangering her own life. The portrayal of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, when the seeds of Nazism are taking root, is especially poignant, and give a reader honest answers to the question of "why didn't every Jew leave?"

Betsy Carter has achieved something remarkable with her third novel; although the background of the story is the Gathering Storm for Jews in Germany during the 1930s, the foreground is the absorbing, full-of-wonders story of an American Jewish family that is based on the author's own forebears. Prodigiously researched and rich in the details of New York daily life in the early decades of the 20th century (it's comforting and thrilling to encounter icons like the "new" Yankee Stadium and the Metropolitan Museum of Art), the book starts with the story of 9-year-old Simon Phelps, who emigrates from Lithuania to New York in 1892, bringing along only a pad and some crayons. As a young man, he meets and marries the beautiful Flora Grossman, a character based on Carter's own great-aunt Flora. With his artistic brilliance and determination, Simon is dubbed America's Puzzle King, who makes a fortune inventing and producing the first mass-marketable cardboard jigsaw puzzles. That too, really happened to Carter's great-uncle, but nearly all the other characters are fictional, like Flora's slinky sister Seema (called "Seamless" by a boyfriend), who collects beaux--and crosses. You know from the book's brief prologue that Flora will become an unlikely heroine (as the real Flora did), with the help of Simon's careful planning and extraordinary generosity. But Carter has also fashioned a diverting and suspenseful saga of the years leading up to 1936, moving back and forth from the Phelpses' affluent life in Yonkers, New York, to the struggles of Flora's family back in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Talk about seamless. Carter has woven a tapestry of real and imagined people and events so skillfully that there are no loose strands. Her book contains all the drama, color and dreams of the best stories---but also the drumbeat of history and the throbbing pulse of real life. Highly recommended!

I think that this book along with Pictures At An Exhibition are the two sleeper books of the year. A compeling story and well written I could not put it down.