NO ORDINARY THING

A magical New York journey through time and the grieving process.

In 1999, 12-year-old orphaned Adam lives with his kindly Uncle Henry. Despite financial hardship, they love each other and Henry’s struggling bakery, although Adam is bullied at school and longs for his parents. When a strange man points him to a magical snow globe, Adam finds himself hopping through time, encountering various points in the lives of three other children—Jack, Daisy, and Francine—whose stories intersect in various ways. The arch, omniscient narrator also shares the connected story of Elbert, a magician and the son of Irish immigrants in the early 20th century, and his search for three pieces of time. Heavy material—Adam, Francine, and Jack have traumatic backstories while Daisy’s family magically controls their underpaid and overworked factory employees, leading to tragedy—is handled (too) lightly, with ultimate messages of acceptance and the beauty of living life in the present made explicit. This sweet, short debut has a few glaring issues with problematic tokenism: Two sage elders, one Black who fills the Magical Negro role and one who is homeless, disabled, and perpetually cheerful, exist only to support biracial (Chinese/White) Adam. The novel has a loose sense of place (this New York City is a sanitized pastiche), but the book still manages to evoke emotional closure.

Imperfect but not without appeal.