THE MAGICIAN'S ASSISTANT by Ann Patchett

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time! I love children's lit and I get a kick out of fantasy and mystery series. As a matter of fact, most of my reading is in those genres. But every now and then you come across a book that blows everything else out of the water. The first book I read by Ann Patchett, Bel Canto, was one of those books. The story and the characters are still as fresh as when I finished the book over two years ago. Like Helen, I was a little leery about reading another of her books because there are too many authors who have one completely awesome book and then everything else is bleh! And the bleh books diminish the power of the one good book because you always have the after-thought "but they also wrote ______ and _____ which sucked!"

Not so with The Magician's Assistant. Actually, by the time I got to reading this book, both Helen and Amanda had read and raved about it so I knew I was safe. Patchett gets you from the first line. "Parsifal is dead. That is the end of the story." To begin with, Parsifal is a great name for a character, dead or alive. It just brings to mind knights and kings and the Holy Grail and Wagner and crashing chords (yes, I was brought up in an opera loving household).

Patchett has a beautiful style of writing. Her story lines are clean and simple - a magician dies and his wife and assistant meets the family she never knew he had - and her characters are so memorable. You know everything about these people and can see them in your head from just a few lines of text. Her minor players often are the ones that affect you the most. There is one that shows up in dreams in this book that makes you want to cry! They are all multi-dimensional. The bully you want to hate shows a redeeming side, so much so that you almost feel sorry for him. The protagonist has secrets that come back to haunt and hurt the ones he loves, but you understand why he kept them hidden. The biggest compliment I can give Patchett is that her characters are real. You know them - they're the people down the block, they're your relatives in the mid-west, they're parts of you.

Bel Canto revolves around an opera singer who has agreed to sing at the birthday party of a big muckety-muck in South America. The party is attended by a lot of important people, including diplomats and Very Important Businessmen, one from Japan who flies in just because this Soprano will be performing. From there, the story unfolds.

If you have some free time (a rare commodity these days, I know), treat yourselves to Ann Patchett. I promise, you won't be disappointed.

Now that I'm done, I'm faced with "what do I read next?" I need to put some air between this and the next new book because if the new one doesn't live up to this, something that normally would be an okay book seems flat in comparison. So I've decided to revisit an old favorite (actually, I started with her after the last disappointing Philippa Gregory) - Mrs. Pollifax. Dorothy Gilman has her own brand of genius - letting us see improbable situations through the eyes of her eminently sensible heroine. Drugged and taken to Albania - okay; resting at a Swiss spa while looking for Plutonium - all right; playing courier in Thailand where her husband gets kidnapped by insurgents - believable. Well, once you accept the premise that a 60+ lady walks into the CIA and tells them she wants to be a spy, and they send her on a mission as an Innocent Tourist, then it all falls into place.

I love Mrs. Pollifax because I want to be her in a few decades. I want to be fearless enough to say, "Let me have the courage to live out my childhood fantasies!" Although finding someone who will hire me to be a writer/publisher/country vet in the Cotswolds (it has to be in England)/spy/jockey with no regard to age, height, weight, or lack of experience may be a little dicey. Actually, what I really want is someone to pay me to read good books all day. Anyone?