Book Review: 'The Magician's Assistant'

Sabine, the magician's assistant of the title, is no longer young and gorgeous and limber. She makes her living constructing architectural models, just as her recently deceased magician husband, Parsifal, really made his living as a rug merchant. Parsifal always told Sabine that he had no surviving relatives, but after his death, she discovers his mother, two sisters, and two nephews living in an old-fashioned town in Nebraska. Grasping at that family as a connection to the love she has lost, in The Magician's Assistant Sabine immerses herself in their life, gradually uncovering the secrets that made the magician the man she knew and, in the process, teaching herself about the banal magic of everyday life. A-