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The Curators
"Part Southern Gothic, part Frankenstein, all thought-provoking." -Kirkus Reviews
A dark, lyrical blend of historical fiction and magical realism, The Curators examines a critically underexplored event in American history through unlikely eyes. All of Atlanta is obsessed with the two-year-long trial and subsequent lynching of Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank in 1915. None more so than thirteen-year-old Ana Wulff and her friends, who take history into their own hands—quite literally—when they use dirt from Ana’s garden to build and animate a golem in Frank’s image. They’ll do anything to keep his story alive, but when their scheme gets out of hand, they must decide what responsibility requires of them. The Curators tells the story of five zealous girls and the cyclonic power of their friendship as they come of age in a country riven by white supremacy.
A dark, lyrical blend of historical fiction and magical realism, The Curators examines a critically underexplored event in American history through unlikely eyes. All of Atlanta is obsessed with the two-year-long trial and subsequent lynching of Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank in 1915. None more so than thirteen-year-old Ana Wulff and her friends, who take history into their own hands—quite literally—when they use dirt from Ana’s garden to build and animate a golem in Frank’s image. They’ll do anything to keep his story alive, but when their scheme gets out of hand, they must decide what responsibility requires of them. The Curators tells the story of five zealous girls and the cyclonic power of their friendship as they come of age in a country riven by white supremacy.
296 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 2024
About the author
Maggie Nye
2 books15 followersMaggie Nye is an author, teacher, and editor living in Tallahassee, Florida, where she is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and nonfiction editor at Southeast Review. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the St. Albans School Writer in Residence program.
Her writing interests include: adaptation, myth, ritual, girlhood, body horror, race and otherness, language-magic, and monstrosity.
Her non-writer interests include: novelty candies, horror movies, getting lost in the woods, roller derby, and her rabbit, Grimoire.
Read her debut, The Curators, if you historical-magical books like: Lincoln in the Bardo and Kindred OR if you like books about ravenous adolescents like Jawbone and We the Animals
Her writing interests include: adaptation, myth, ritual, girlhood, body horror, race and otherness, language-magic, and monstrosity.
Her non-writer interests include: novelty candies, horror movies, getting lost in the woods, roller derby, and her rabbit, Grimoire.
Read her debut, The Curators, if you historical-magical books like: Lincoln in the Bardo and Kindred OR if you like books about ravenous adolescents like Jawbone and We the Animals
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
April 10, 2024
Maggie Nye’s intense, inventive debut novel blends history with fantasy and folklore to form an exceptionally vivid portrait of Atlanta during the indictment and subsequent lynching of Jewish business manager Leo Frank. In 1913 Frank – formally pardoned in the 1980s – was convicted of the brutal rape and murder of thirteen-year-old employee Mary Phagan. In Nye’s retelling, five Jewish girls, the same age as Phagan when she died, become obsessed with Phagan and with saving Frank. Atlanta’s atmosphere of simmering violence and growing antisemitism means the girls have been warned to keep together for their own safety like “chewing gum on a seat.” But their inseparability has resulted in a loss of personal and physical boundaries, so that at times they seem to melt into each other. Their collective struggle to comprehend a world in which fragments of rope used to kill Frank are openly sold on local streets leads the girls to take refuge in magic – partly stirred by references to witchcraft in the “murder notes” found next to Phagan’s body. Remembering bedtime stories of the fantastical golem created by Prague’s Jewish community to ward off horrific persecution, the girls decide to conjure their own. A creature who can avenge Frank and, perhaps even, Phagan.
Presented as a series of interlinking vignettes which highlight issues of scapegoating and expose Atlanta’s complex hierarchies of race and class, Nye’s narrative gradually takes on a sinister fairy tale quality. Nye’s work often centres on girlhood from short fiction to accounts of her own fascination with crimes like the Slender Man teen stabbing. Here, in the spirit of Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Tayari Jones’s Leaving Atlanta, Nye explores the moment between childhood and adolescence in a time of crisis: questions of knowledge and experience, identification and projection, and children’s perceptions of the adult world. She reflects too on the stories children construct to make sense of what’s happening to, and around, them.
Nye extends her gaze to take in notions of truth versus falsity, how events alter through retelling: history mutating into myth; facts twisted to support their tellers’ agendas. Something that’s particularly significant in relation to Frank and Phagan. It’s said that Leo Frank’s known to every American neo-Nazi - his slaughter directly connected to the KKK’s resurgence in 1915. His case’s relentlessly rehashed on numerous white supremacist sites where Phagan’s worshipped as the ultimate white martyr and Frank cast as symbol of “Jewish evil” linked to everything from “blood libel” to diabolical international conspiracies – like the golem Frank and Phagan are raw material reshaped into mystical, mythical figures in support of the neo-Nazi cause. A development anticipated and carefully countered in Nye’s narrative. Debut novels are notorious for being uneven and this is no exception. But it’s also richly imagined packed with arresting images, with stretches I found close to mesmerising.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Curbstone Books for an ARC
Presented as a series of interlinking vignettes which highlight issues of scapegoating and expose Atlanta’s complex hierarchies of race and class, Nye’s narrative gradually takes on a sinister fairy tale quality. Nye’s work often centres on girlhood from short fiction to accounts of her own fascination with crimes like the Slender Man teen stabbing. Here, in the spirit of Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Tayari Jones’s Leaving Atlanta, Nye explores the moment between childhood and adolescence in a time of crisis: questions of knowledge and experience, identification and projection, and children’s perceptions of the adult world. She reflects too on the stories children construct to make sense of what’s happening to, and around, them.
Nye extends her gaze to take in notions of truth versus falsity, how events alter through retelling: history mutating into myth; facts twisted to support their tellers’ agendas. Something that’s particularly significant in relation to Frank and Phagan. It’s said that Leo Frank’s known to every American neo-Nazi - his slaughter directly connected to the KKK’s resurgence in 1915. His case’s relentlessly rehashed on numerous white supremacist sites where Phagan’s worshipped as the ultimate white martyr and Frank cast as symbol of “Jewish evil” linked to everything from “blood libel” to diabolical international conspiracies – like the golem Frank and Phagan are raw material reshaped into mystical, mythical figures in support of the neo-Nazi cause. A development anticipated and carefully countered in Nye’s narrative. Debut novels are notorious for being uneven and this is no exception. But it’s also richly imagined packed with arresting images, with stretches I found close to mesmerising.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Curbstone Books for an ARC
May 19, 2024
I think I enjoyed the concept of this novel and Nye's probing, nuanced way of thinking about her subjects a bit more than actually reading the book: the circular, non-progressive narrative which circles and intertwines is absolutely the right form and shape for the material and approach - and yet it's that very stasis, repetition and form that started to drag down my enjoyment. The typography, in particular, came between me and the story: the main narrative in regular font, the group-voice of the girls in italics tired me both visually and in terms of engagement with the text.
That said, Nye has found a creative way of re-opening a tale of racism, anti-Semitism, violence, America, female adolescence and questions over story-telling and narrative. The underlying case of Mary Phagan and Leo Frank is worth Googling before you start reading this as it's more a kind of extended intertext to this story than the central matter of the book. And the adolescent girls at the heart of this tale reminded me of The Crucible, though with a more sympathetic approach to the girls which doesn't make them more metaphor than 'real'.
Nye's writing is often striking on both the sentence and figurative level: I was especially struck by the image of the five girls intertwined like a spider, conjuring up all those adolescent limbs and the way teenage girls cleave to each other. The use of real-life newspapers and other documents is adroit and the whole thing is nicely provocative, leaning towards openness rather than closing down the story to some kind of spurious and neat conclusion.
So without doubt an imaginative way of straddling cultural fissures and lines between the past and present - yet somehow I didn't gel with this in quite the satisfactory way that I expected.
3-3.5 stars rounded up.
Thanks to Northwestern University Press for an ARC via NetGalley
That said, Nye has found a creative way of re-opening a tale of racism, anti-Semitism, violence, America, female adolescence and questions over story-telling and narrative. The underlying case of Mary Phagan and Leo Frank is worth Googling before you start reading this as it's more a kind of extended intertext to this story than the central matter of the book. And the adolescent girls at the heart of this tale reminded me of The Crucible, though with a more sympathetic approach to the girls which doesn't make them more metaphor than 'real'.
Nye's writing is often striking on both the sentence and figurative level: I was especially struck by the image of the five girls intertwined like a spider, conjuring up all those adolescent limbs and the way teenage girls cleave to each other. The use of real-life newspapers and other documents is adroit and the whole thing is nicely provocative, leaning towards openness rather than closing down the story to some kind of spurious and neat conclusion.
So without doubt an imaginative way of straddling cultural fissures and lines between the past and present - yet somehow I didn't gel with this in quite the satisfactory way that I expected.
3-3.5 stars rounded up.
Thanks to Northwestern University Press for an ARC via NetGalley
May 10, 2024
Thoroughly enjoyed the collective voice the author uses here, and the writing itself is beautiful. I always enjoy a merging of the historical with the magical, and this book pulls off the balance.
May 18, 2024
Many thanks to NetGalley and Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press for an ARC of this novel.
This is an imaginative retelling of a real historical case, the murder of 12 year old pencil factory worker Mary Phagan in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 1913. The accused, 29 year old Leo Frank, factory superintendent, had married into a prominent local Jewish family. Handsome, wealthy and well-educated, he was a symbol of Jewish success—and a magnet for anti-semitic resentment. Charged with rape and murder, he maintained his innocence throughout his trial and incarceration. He was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. Two years later he was kidnapped from jail and lynched by a mob that evidently contained some well known citizens, a fate that, until the Frank case, had been reserved for Black men.
The case divided the city’s Jewish residents. While they saw it for the blatant antisemitism that it was, those of the respectable middle class were proudly assimilated Americans. Many feared drawing attention to themselves and their own families. Whether American-born or immigrants, they were all too aware of the pogroms of Europe and the centuries of persecution behind them. Jewish children, from a very young age, were told the various versions of the legend of the golem, the clay figure given life by Rabbi Loew In the 16th century to protect the Jews of Prague. It was a cautionary tale about survival. The golem story, in its own strange way, figures strongly in the narrative.
The perspective is that of young Ana Wulff, only daughter of a prosperous Jewish textiles manufacturer, whose doting, indulgent parents are at once obsessive about her health and safety and yet mostly oblivious to what she and her ´girl gang’ are up to. On the verge of 14, in the most liminal and fraught of life stages, Ana and her friends become fixated on Frank and Phagan. Really, they are fixated on the sensationalized newspaper coverage, especially in the racist Atlanta Constitution, a real newspaper that the author draws on frequently, as she does on Ana’s fictive personal diary. The juxtaposition of the two, and the often hilarious references to ladies’ magazines, effectively suggest how mass media was infiltrating young minds even in the early 20th century. But resistance is also demonstrated in the girls’ take on the case. Ana and her four close friends make Frank a strange idol, not so much as a victim of race hatred. but for the qualities that spark their adolescent imaginings about love, gender, and sex, ‘virtue,’ responsibility, and growing up in a society fractured by race, class and gender hostility.
Ana’s gang members are deliberately blurred to emphasize their group identity—often, reference to individuals becomes ‘one of us said…’, and they are frequently likened to a five headed spider, thinking, moving, even sleeping with legs entwined. But Ana is always in the forefront. She is the creative one, the subversive, the one who most tests the many rigid confines of her time and place.
This is not a traditional historical fiction that reimagines ´what happened when. ´ Nye interweaves religion, tradition, ritual and legend, with magical realism and satire to capture both the unreasoning and evil elements of history and the intemperate sensitivities of adolescent girls. The writing is excellent. The plotting is complicated, and I had to read the ending a few times, but those can also be seen as the novel’s worthwhile challenges.
This is an imaginative retelling of a real historical case, the murder of 12 year old pencil factory worker Mary Phagan in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 1913. The accused, 29 year old Leo Frank, factory superintendent, had married into a prominent local Jewish family. Handsome, wealthy and well-educated, he was a symbol of Jewish success—and a magnet for anti-semitic resentment. Charged with rape and murder, he maintained his innocence throughout his trial and incarceration. He was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. Two years later he was kidnapped from jail and lynched by a mob that evidently contained some well known citizens, a fate that, until the Frank case, had been reserved for Black men.
The case divided the city’s Jewish residents. While they saw it for the blatant antisemitism that it was, those of the respectable middle class were proudly assimilated Americans. Many feared drawing attention to themselves and their own families. Whether American-born or immigrants, they were all too aware of the pogroms of Europe and the centuries of persecution behind them. Jewish children, from a very young age, were told the various versions of the legend of the golem, the clay figure given life by Rabbi Loew In the 16th century to protect the Jews of Prague. It was a cautionary tale about survival. The golem story, in its own strange way, figures strongly in the narrative.
The perspective is that of young Ana Wulff, only daughter of a prosperous Jewish textiles manufacturer, whose doting, indulgent parents are at once obsessive about her health and safety and yet mostly oblivious to what she and her ´girl gang’ are up to. On the verge of 14, in the most liminal and fraught of life stages, Ana and her friends become fixated on Frank and Phagan. Really, they are fixated on the sensationalized newspaper coverage, especially in the racist Atlanta Constitution, a real newspaper that the author draws on frequently, as she does on Ana’s fictive personal diary. The juxtaposition of the two, and the often hilarious references to ladies’ magazines, effectively suggest how mass media was infiltrating young minds even in the early 20th century. But resistance is also demonstrated in the girls’ take on the case. Ana and her four close friends make Frank a strange idol, not so much as a victim of race hatred. but for the qualities that spark their adolescent imaginings about love, gender, and sex, ‘virtue,’ responsibility, and growing up in a society fractured by race, class and gender hostility.
Ana’s gang members are deliberately blurred to emphasize their group identity—often, reference to individuals becomes ‘one of us said…’, and they are frequently likened to a five headed spider, thinking, moving, even sleeping with legs entwined. But Ana is always in the forefront. She is the creative one, the subversive, the one who most tests the many rigid confines of her time and place.
This is not a traditional historical fiction that reimagines ´what happened when. ´ Nye interweaves religion, tradition, ritual and legend, with magical realism and satire to capture both the unreasoning and evil elements of history and the intemperate sensitivities of adolescent girls. The writing is excellent. The plotting is complicated, and I had to read the ending a few times, but those can also be seen as the novel’s worthwhile challenges.
July 4, 2024
Wow. The author has immersed her readers in a fictional, yet recognizable world, backboned by actual events of the time. She shows empathy and understanding towards her characters, even when they are behaving badly. The writing is both poetic and vivid and provides the reader with a sensory experience, one that challenges them to draw their own conclusions about life, morality, history. To me, this is not a beach read. It asks more of its audience.
May 14, 2024
Received an ARC from NetGalley
At times a bit confusing (perhaps this is because I was unfamiliar with the Mary Phaghan murder - i have since researched it and am better informed), but the writing and the fairy tale like qualities of the story kept me mesmerized. I love stories written from the pov of young girls - especially if that story involves magical thinking and is infused with religion and folklore. If you enjoy those things as well, this book may be for you.
At times a bit confusing (perhaps this is because I was unfamiliar with the Mary Phaghan murder - i have since researched it and am better informed), but the writing and the fairy tale like qualities of the story kept me mesmerized. I love stories written from the pov of young girls - especially if that story involves magical thinking and is infused with religion and folklore. If you enjoy those things as well, this book may be for you.
May 29, 2024
The plot itself is haunting and engrossing. The prose is elegant and easy to read with enough of a philosophical bent to get me underlining excerpts.
July 31, 2024
5 young Jewish girls become obsessed with a local murder in Atlanta in 1915. Their perceived involvement in the case spikes after the lynching of the accused murderer whose sentence was initially commuted by the governor. The man who was lynched was Jewish, although at one time a Black man was also accused of the crime. The tensions between a racist society, between adults and children, between those in authority and those subject to it wind through the story. But the meat of the book delves deeply into the close friendship of the girls, a small group from a small community, feeling the growing pains of their occasionally clashing personalities. And then halfway through the tale, as a way to keep their passion for the dead possible murderer, they decide to create a golem. The girls are often not nice to each other intentionally, and can be thoughtlessly cruel to others as well. But this creature they create takes their lives in a whole new direction.
There's a lot of philosophy throughout the book, and the flow is almost poetic at times.
I didn't love it, but I will stick with me. The author (quoting someone else) intended to write "literature that invites the reader to 'see more complexity, more nuance, more differentiation in humans, not less.'"
There's a lot of philosophy throughout the book, and the flow is almost poetic at times.
I didn't love it, but I will stick with me. The author (quoting someone else) intended to write "literature that invites the reader to 'see more complexity, more nuance, more differentiation in humans, not less.'"
September 17, 2024
Maggie Nye's book, The Curators, examines a wealth of big, existentialish questions about truth (who creates it? who defines it? is it static and absolute? or something much more amorphous and maleable?) And about language (can there be meaning or truth outside of language? and does the advent of language mean that we are only regurgitating ideas and concepts that have been fed to us? Can there be original thought within the confines of language?)
But it's also a story about girlhood. And the struggle to create boundaries and then to willingly tear down those boundaries to gain access to each other, to consume each other, to share knowledge, to belong. This girlhood narrative is fraught. I found myself wanting to fight against it the whole way--but those constrictions also felt familiar.
The interweaving of Jewish myth into a historical fiction narrative--with a decidedly literary bent--is artful and innovative. I wish I'd had an entire graduate school seminar in which to turn this novel over, talk about it, sit with it. It is the kind of book that can withstand that kind of attention--a compliment of high degree.
Purchase The Curators through our Bookshop link & support Bookish Atlanta: https://bookshop.org/a/4334/978081014...
But it's also a story about girlhood. And the struggle to create boundaries and then to willingly tear down those boundaries to gain access to each other, to consume each other, to share knowledge, to belong. This girlhood narrative is fraught. I found myself wanting to fight against it the whole way--but those constrictions also felt familiar.
The interweaving of Jewish myth into a historical fiction narrative--with a decidedly literary bent--is artful and innovative. I wish I'd had an entire graduate school seminar in which to turn this novel over, talk about it, sit with it. It is the kind of book that can withstand that kind of attention--a compliment of high degree.
Purchase The Curators through our Bookshop link & support Bookish Atlanta: https://bookshop.org/a/4334/978081014...
February 17, 2025
I found the book very smartly written and dark, with a complex story line. It left me, as Maggie Nye intended, with an unsettling feeling. My love of historical fiction and learning something new was indulged. I am embarrassed to say I had never heard of Leo Frank case and it is important one to know.
I especially loved how the author brought the “scenes” and (sometimes awful) girls to life…as well as the golem. I felt the dark attic and smelled the dirt. (I would have thought the golem "thing" was really weird but I read “The Golem and the Gini” and became familiar with this fascinating Jewish folklore.)
I had a little trouble with knowing who was speaking when, but it’s a style new to me. Totally different in style than what I usually read. So, that was good for me and it is creatively and beautifully written. Some of the phrasing and descriptions are simply WOW.
Highly recommend and think it would be a good bookclub read (for those bookclubs that enjoy more challenging reads; definitely not a beach read, although I did finish it poolside!) because there is so much to discuss.
I especially loved how the author brought the “scenes” and (sometimes awful) girls to life…as well as the golem. I felt the dark attic and smelled the dirt. (I would have thought the golem "thing" was really weird but I read “The Golem and the Gini” and became familiar with this fascinating Jewish folklore.)
I had a little trouble with knowing who was speaking when, but it’s a style new to me. Totally different in style than what I usually read. So, that was good for me and it is creatively and beautifully written. Some of the phrasing and descriptions are simply WOW.
Highly recommend and think it would be a good bookclub read (for those bookclubs that enjoy more challenging reads; definitely not a beach read, although I did finish it poolside!) because there is so much to discuss.
April 19, 2024
“You’re not a little girl. Or if you are, you shouldn't be any longer. It is a dangerous, useless thing to be.” So says the mother of Ana Wulff in a warning to her daughter on the eve of her 14th birthday not to believe in happily ever after fairy tales, specifically the Eastern European Jewish origin golem story. When Ana asks her mother if a golem is good or bad her mother replies, “ The golem is nothing his makers are not also”.
Maggie Nye’s debut novel, The Curators, is set against the backdrop of the real life murder of 13 year old pencil factory worker Mary Phagan and the mob lynching of the factory’s manager Leo Frank for the crime. Ana and her girl gang, whom Nye likens to a many legged spider, become obsessed with Frank, a successful member of their own community, while also imagining what it must have been like to be Mary Phagan, a girl/woman, they, protected by middle class families and insular culture, will never be.
The Curators offers stunning insight into the moment between female childhood and adolescence, in a smoldering Atlanta governed by strict sensibilities about race and class, with anti semitism hovering in the sultry air. A mixture of historical fiction and magical realism, Nye’s Ana leads the girl group as they create a golem to save Leo Frank’s memory and perhaps Mary Phagan herself. But how like its many legged makers is the golem? Is he “a lame lump of dirt” or “some kind of magic?”
The Curators is an imaginative, beautifully written first novel. Can’t wait to read Nye’s next one.
I received an Advance Reader Copy of this book.
Maggie Nye’s debut novel, The Curators, is set against the backdrop of the real life murder of 13 year old pencil factory worker Mary Phagan and the mob lynching of the factory’s manager Leo Frank for the crime. Ana and her girl gang, whom Nye likens to a many legged spider, become obsessed with Frank, a successful member of their own community, while also imagining what it must have been like to be Mary Phagan, a girl/woman, they, protected by middle class families and insular culture, will never be.
The Curators offers stunning insight into the moment between female childhood and adolescence, in a smoldering Atlanta governed by strict sensibilities about race and class, with anti semitism hovering in the sultry air. A mixture of historical fiction and magical realism, Nye’s Ana leads the girl group as they create a golem to save Leo Frank’s memory and perhaps Mary Phagan herself. But how like its many legged makers is the golem? Is he “a lame lump of dirt” or “some kind of magic?”
The Curators is an imaginative, beautifully written first novel. Can’t wait to read Nye’s next one.
I received an Advance Reader Copy of this book.
June 25, 2024
1915 Atlanta was less interested in the war in Europe, instead the newspapers and conversations were focused on the case of Leo Frank. Frank, a Jewish industrialist was accused of murdering his thirteen year old employee, Mary Phagan. He would be murdered by a lynch mob in 1917. This infamous case forms the central narrative thread of The Curators told through the experiences of a small group of Jewish teenagers who become obsessed with the case. They developing their own club and collection that they curate, it centered on Frank with rules such as wearing a locket with his image at all times. And at his death, they consider how to both protect themselves and their family and maybe revenge too.
How do you respond to your community killing someone with the same faith as you? What of the mythical forces you might be able to call upon? Both coming of age and historical fiction, Nye writers first through a collective voice of the five girls, before shifting to naive and impetus Ana Wulff’s story. All of girls are Jewish and don’t fit in with their peers, marked as other. But at least they have their group. Through Frank’s life they see the way a community can turn against one they feel has trespassed beyond their place or threatened the status quo.
It’s clear a lot of research and thought went in to the creation of this book and the writing is very lyrical and imaginative. The true story inspiration is one of America’s shameful episodes. However, the interesting approach of the collective voice is not maintained, and the book shifts from something unique to a more standard coming of age story, but with clear consequences.
Recommended to readers of female centered coming of age stories, historical fiction or stories with events that question if there is magic or it’s all in your (narrator’s) head.
I received a free digital version of this book via NetGalley thanks to the publisher.
How do you respond to your community killing someone with the same faith as you? What of the mythical forces you might be able to call upon? Both coming of age and historical fiction, Nye writers first through a collective voice of the five girls, before shifting to naive and impetus Ana Wulff’s story. All of girls are Jewish and don’t fit in with their peers, marked as other. But at least they have their group. Through Frank’s life they see the way a community can turn against one they feel has trespassed beyond their place or threatened the status quo.
It’s clear a lot of research and thought went in to the creation of this book and the writing is very lyrical and imaginative. The true story inspiration is one of America’s shameful episodes. However, the interesting approach of the collective voice is not maintained, and the book shifts from something unique to a more standard coming of age story, but with clear consequences.
Recommended to readers of female centered coming of age stories, historical fiction or stories with events that question if there is magic or it’s all in your (narrator’s) head.
I received a free digital version of this book via NetGalley thanks to the publisher.
April 12, 2024
A beautifully written, stunning debut novel. It takes a difficult historical situation and forces us to reckon with its many dimensions, taking a creative and deeply thought provoking approach to the many sociopolitical layers. Nye also does an incredible job inhabiting the voice of the preteen collective who narrate the novel. By turns moving, hilarious, and bracing, Nye demonstrates a unique ability to weave multiple genres and perspectives into an extremely promising first book. I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in historical fiction and/or magical realism, but really to readers of all stripes.
October 19, 2024
I knew nothing of Leo Frank and Mary Phagan before reading Nye's mesmerizing debut novel, and I can honestly say that the book's fantastic melding of fact and fiction wholly captivated me. The "we" narration (that centers Ana) is wonderfully executed, as is the political made personal here. I was hooked from the outset, but from the chapter titled "Skipping Rope" on, I felt almost as fanatical as one of the Felicitous Five. What a rich, if sometimes fittingly uncomfortable, read, with so much of the gory and glory of girlhood (and human beings!) on fascinating display.
March 12, 2025
I was considering all of the adjectives that Inwould use to describe this book. The list is shortened by simply stating the opposite of what this book - not fluff. If you’re a reader that doesn’t want to be riveted, disturbed at times and have your mind blown, then don’t read this book.
The writing is incredible - the descriptions; the voice; the inventiveness. It is complex intertwining of folklore, coming of age in 1915 Atlanta, young girl friendships, antisemitism, racism, and magical realism. I have never read anything like this!
The writing is incredible - the descriptions; the voice; the inventiveness. It is complex intertwining of folklore, coming of age in 1915 Atlanta, young girl friendships, antisemitism, racism, and magical realism. I have never read anything like this!
May 27, 2025
a dreamlike read and an impressive achievement for a debut. it managed to juggle a whimsical childlike perspective with lovely magical realist/folkloric elements, against the sobering backdrop of the lunching of Leo Frank and the 1910s segregated south. interesting to read a story like this from the perspective of a “we” - a group of jewish girls from immigrant families who are simultaneously conditioned into the social mores of the time and trying to break out of the prescribed confines of those mores through magic and imagination, the avenues that’s are most accessible to them
April 9, 2025
This is a beautiful, messy book. It perfectly captures that lawless danger of 14-year-olds in the process of learning to be socialized creatures.
It does a good job, too, of showing the evil in the world honestly.
And oh! The golem! I adored him.
There were a few passages that I felt were a bit ... repetitious? Messy? Wracking my head to remember the details, but just so you know when you hit those passages, that it's worth it to plush along past them. They're not very long.
It does a good job, too, of showing the evil in the world honestly.
And oh! The golem! I adored him.
There were a few passages that I felt were a bit ... repetitious? Messy? Wracking my head to remember the details, but just so you know when you hit those passages, that it's worth it to plush along past them. They're not very long.
April 12, 2024
I wasn't always sure what to make of this, at times wonderful, and thought provoking, at other times I felt confused.
It's different, it's interesting, but I'm not sure I fully understood every bit of it.
I'd still recommend though.
It's different, it's interesting, but I'm not sure I fully understood every bit of it.
I'd still recommend though.
Did Not Finish
May 6, 2024Book seemed interesting but the ARC file was corrupted - I just can’t read an entire novel with most “th”s and “f”s missing!!
June 8, 2024
A strong debut novel, with wonderfully dream-like magical realist prose.
Read
June 20, 2024Full review in Southern Review of Books
Read
June 22, 2024Wow. A bit nuts. But interesting.
July 29, 2025
Confusing but intriguing. Not exactly sure what I just read but it is written very well and the author is extremely talented.
November 21, 2025
Thoroughly enjoyable.
Read
December 17, 2024I am so sorry. I'm going to sound like a jerk and possibly insane. Very early on the author uses the wrong form of "rapped," as in "she rapped her knuckles on the door," and it threw me so out of the book that I couldn't get back into it.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews