MAGICIAN

An unnamed protagonist runs away and joins the circus, only to discover that his magical powers hold as much potential for freedom as for destruction.

Raised by a brutal mother who forces him to carry out her cruelties alongside a constantly shifting cast of shadowy “uncles,” the Boy dreams of finding a home and a place to belong. After a particularly harrowing experience at his mother’s hands, he flees into the woods, where he encounters a mysterious orb that contains a traveling carnival. The Boy begins to feel at home among the ragtag carnival family, which includes the berobed leader, Terminus; a pair of conjoined sisters, Morningside and Eveningside; a menagerie of exotic animals including jaguarundi and Siberian tigers; and especially the magician, Sullivan, who takes the Boy under his wing as an apprentice. As the Boy becomes the Young Man, he learns at Sullivan’s side and, as his powers grow, he begins developing ambitions of his own—but then his ideas about how to make the show bigger and more powerful ignite a rivalry between him and his mentor. After a betrayal, what the Young Man believes will be his crowning achievement yields catastrophic results, and he’s cast out from his found family to wander alone. He drifts, haunted by his past, until he encounters a woman: Her, whose lightness promises to chase away his darkness. Just as he begins to feel he has finally escaped his violent past, he is forced to reckon with it once and for all. The writing is lush and sumptuous, and at its best, it conjures the Magician’s world with haunting vividness. Occasionally, however, the prose tips into an overwrought style that dulls rather than deepens the novel’s enchantment: “His body...lies in scant writhe,” for example.

A haunting fantasy that, while occasionally melodramatic, strikingly illuminates the cycles of familial violence.