book cover of Jacob\'s Folly
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Jacob's Folly

(2013)
A novel by

 
 
A luminous novel - funny and moving in equal measure - that shines with the author's unique talents

Jacob's Folly is a rollicking, ingenious, saucy book that takes on desire, faith, love, acting - and reincarnation.
     The novel brims with sparkling, unexpected characters: Jacob, a Jewish peddler living in eighteenth-century France; Leslie and Deirdre Senzatimore, a settled American couple; Masha, an alluring young Ultra-Orthodox Jew, who is also gravely ill. In Rebecca Miller's self-assured second novel, these four individuals will find their fates intertwined when Jacob is reincarnated as a fly in contemporary Long Island.
     Miller's quirky humor and acute, original intelligence animate a wonderfully memorable protagonist. Through the unique lens of Jacob's consciousness, she explores transformation in all its different guises - personal, spiritual, literal. As she considers the hold of the past on the present, the power of private hopes and dreams, and the collision of fate and free will, Miller's world - which is our own, transfigured by her clear gaze and by her sharp, surprising wit - comes to life. Leslie's desire to act as hero and rescuer; Jacob's disastrous marriage to the childlike Hodel and his obsession with Masha - Miller sketches her characters' interior lives with compassion, subtlety, and an exceptionally light touch. Jacob's Folly is wildly inventive and ultimately moving; it will leave the reader, no less than its characters, transformed.


Genre: Literary Fiction

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