Love, love, love this book. The main characters, grandfather Nate and granddaughter Grace, are two of the best characters I’ve read in a long time. They are a good match—both prickly and difficult— but they have moral courage and they call things like they see them. Their dialog is one of the book’s many highlights, and their struggle to understand and support each other would be enough of a story by itself. But Rosen takes the novel two big steps forward when he sets their relationship in a present day crime ring and in the context of a profound and tragic family drama stemming from events in WWII. The crime plot gives the novel a brisk suspenseful pace, while the slowly revealed family story adds real emotional depth. And the theme of magic runs through everything like a beautiful melody. Nate is a magician trying to pass on his skills and his hard-won wisdom to Grace. As he teaches her magic, he reveals himself (his passion, his values, and his regrets) by degrees and we come to appreciate the magician’s art in a whole new way. ( )

The magician teaches his apprentice to tell stories, because it’s story that diverts the listener from watching the hands; story gives the magic shape, and story offers escape. Just for a moment, a small child laughs, and it doesn’t matter that the coin was a trick; what matters is the spark of joy and the knowledge that it’s real. In Leonard Rosen’s The Kortelisy Escape, the tricks are delightfully diagramed and explained, but the story grows, keeping the reader distracted from past and future. There’s a different magic, a literary magic, at work behind the scenes.

Jailed by a cruel trick of manmade laws, freed by an even crueler trick, betrayed by friend, determined to rescue brother, and ensnared by the magic of unexpected affection, Nate Larson is a magician who surely can’t escape. Granddaughter Grace is a willing and cynical apprentice, running from her own many betrayals, and determined never to return to another foster home. But will they let each other down in the end? Will fate betray them? Or is there a magical trick that can rescue them?

The magician’s tales build fairytale joy from cruel despairs of his youth. Truth leaks around the edges, and, as in the best of magic, nothing is quite what it seems. But how? The reader is caught, watching and reading the sleight of hand, trusting author and character to make it work, and eagerly praying for a happy ending.

Kortelisy itself is not what it seems either. And the Russian dolls on the cover of this book illustrate the story perfectly. Holding, keeping, stealing, freeing, telling… this book does it all, and is a solidly real and magical read.

Disclosure: I was given a preview edition and I love it! ( )