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The Hidden Palace” is a terrifically written, grown up fairy tale combining perfectly historical fiction with fantasy fiction, whilst fusing a touching love triangle with a tense and gripping tale. Looking at Jefferies’ work as a whole, the balance seen in The Hidden Palace is typical. She says that in her novels she likes “to write about the enduring power of the human spirit to rise above [the] darkness” of war and personal tragedy. Drawing on her own experience of tragedy, she says her novels tend “to contain elements of love and loss but also hope”. I recall enjoying The Golem and the Jinni very much, but I had forgotten some key story elements, particularly the jinni's encounter with the human Sophia Winston and its lasting physical effect on her. A bit of a refresher is given on this and other preceding events, though I would hesitate to give this sequel to anyone who hadn't read the first. The Hidden Palace focuses more on 1 of those 3 sisters and how she tries to move on after the end of the war. However, her efforts are diverted when her estranged mother requests that she try to find her long lost aunt.
The research-heavy part of this one was more specific. There’s a lot of Middle Eastern stuff I ended up researching, leading up to World War I, for the part where Sophia is traveling through the Middle East. I did a decent amount of research on metalsmithing and steel-frame architecture, just so I could talk about what Ahmad was doing without being a total ignoramus. Obviously I’m not getting a degree in architecture or anything, and I had to remind myself of that. But I wanted to at least not pull people out of the story with them going, “Okay, she doesn’t understand what she’s talking about here.” I did a decent amount of research on what was being called Domestic Sciences at the time, the subject Chava gets a degree in. I actually found the Teacher’s College Handbook, the coursebook from 1912 or something like that, and I tried to faithfully reproduce all the language. They were talking about the courses as this combination of the womanly mothering instinct, and scientific exactitude. “We’re going to focus science on being a woman, and turn it into something you can get right or wrong.” So it was more about drilling down into particular subjects. I loved how the connecting but individual stories blended together seamlessly. Sophia’s descriptive and exotic travels through the Middle East, the jinni and his Lebanese business partner Arbeely as they work alongside each other in their ‘Little Syria’s’ forge. The golem and her friend Anna as they deal with their unusual friendship and a Rabbi’s daughter, as she is left in sole charge of her father’s own golem creation. Big rings that lead to special stages have not been implemented completely yet, but code and art for it exists in the ROM. One hand brushed along her hip; his fingers found a divot where the metal spar had pierced her. He winced, and moved his hand away. “Does that hurt?” From the shoreline came a note of surprise, small but edifying. He pushed with the other foot, and then again, moving outward from the shore, curving slightly to the right; he leaned left, found his balance, and swerved to an upright halt. He looked around, pleased with himself, then took off again: one foot and then the other, finding a rhythm, building speed, the wind whistling past him as he curved out toward the center of the pond…Definitely recommended if you enjoyed the first book, or if you like historical fiction with a dual timeline. Which brings me to another great solution found by the author for introducing new twists in the quest for assimilation of different cultures into this cauldron that is the New World. Both Chava and Ahmad are set to confront their own inner demons in the form of a couple feral versions of themselves : a violence prone golem of great strength but little social skills and a wild jinni from Syria that prefers the fire form and doing only what pleases her. The staff credit sequence, continue screen, and the ending sequence have not been implemented and do not exist in the ROM in any form yet. The novel focusses on two women in two different times but both closely linked to wartime and its aftermath. In the latter years of WW2 and following its end, Florence is reeling from the war and a secret about her own past she has uncovered. Her relationship with her mother is not good but she is persuaded to try to find Rosalie, her mother’s sister, who disappeared some years before. In the earlier strand of the story, we follow Rosalie in the 1920s in Malta as she too uncovers some dark secrets.
The demo after the title screen desyncs, causing Sonic to die instantly. It seems that the demo was recorded for a different level layout. The same demo recording seems to be used for each level presented. The game uses a different fade out routine when Sonic dies during a demo. For some odd reason, if the demo is played with debug mode enabled, Sonic will eventually go into debug mode (due to a random B button press in the demo) and will start rapidly placing the selected object until the demo eventually ends. Say I had to have an event at a particular time, since I’m nailing a lot of the narrative to established historical events. So I would have a particular historical event in the book, and things that needed to flow around it. But all the characters would be sitting around twiddling their thumbs and waiting for this thing to happen. And then as soon as the thing happened, they were off to the races. I was like, “No, that isn’t gonna work.” So I’d have to unhook everything from that historical event, and put something else in its place, so everything could smooth out. There are multiple narrators and they took turns being my favorite. There are, of course, Chava (the golem) and Ahmad (the jinni), along with Sophia (the young women whose brief dalliance with Ahmad in The Golem and the Jinni has left her in persistent physical suffering), Anna and her son Toby (Chava's pregnant friend from the previous book), and two new characters: a young jinn woman in the Syrian desert, and Kreindel, the young daughter of an Orthodox rabbi who stumbles into dark magic. Their stories all weave closer and closer together until they are all drawn together in a climactic finish. My heart sunk when I realised this was the middle book of a trilogy… however, I happily read this without knowing the relationship between the three sisters and enjoyed Jefferies interesting novel about Malta’s experience of war.The prototype uses a standard SEGA title screen commonly used in other games. The SEGA scream is absent and isn’t present in the ROM. A powerful story of love and loss that is utterly captivating. I was drawn deep into the world of Malaya and England in the 1950s in this intense exploration of what it means to love. Beautifully written and wonderfully atmospheric, Dinah Jefferies skilfully captures this fragile moment of history in a complex and thrilling tale. THE SEPARATION is a gripping and intelligent read.' He looked up. The Golem was a small, dark figure silhouetted against the Ladies’ Cottage. The frozen pond stretched between them. He’d skated clear to the other side.
Speaking of hot things, in Book One, Ahmad was mostly an elemental character, all fire and immediate gratification. Book Two shows a bad boy who can still bring the heat, but who has gained considerably more awareness, of himself, and of the world around him. He has grown a sense of decency, personal responsibility, and a need for purpose. He remains in business with Arbeely, the man who had released him from his thousand-year imprisonment in a flask. He molds iron with his bare hands. Business is good, booming even, so they expand to grander quarters, where Ahmad’s smoldering creative ambitions ignite to full blast. It was good to revisit the characters of Chava the golem and Ahmad the jinni as their relationship develops and they continue to try to fit in among the humans of early 20th century America. The historical setting is meticulously recreated, from the immigrant neighborhoods of New York to the towns and deserts of Syria, where Sophia seeks a cure for her malady. Significant events are woven into the story, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the sinking of the Titanic, and characters encounter notable figures like T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell. The above was the brief review that I wrote after reading The Golem and the Jinni. I could say pretty much the same thing about this long awaited sequel. The story of Chava and Ahmad continues, with some new characters including another golem and another jinni, a female jinniyeh, as well as some recurring characters, Anna and Sophia. Told from multiple perspectives, their stories mesh, moving between Syria to New York City. Just as in the first book, this will require a suspension of disbelief and my guess is that if you enjoyed the first book and were as anxious as I was to see what the future would bring for Chava and Ahmad, you’ll enjoy this one. It’s over eight years since the first book , so I was glad that the author refreshes us with some of the details of that book.Uses just one level layout, which looks nothing like any of the layouts used in the final version. It doesn’t appear that other layouts exist in the ROM.
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