kleonard 's review for:

The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros

5.0

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This is a gorgeous novel about love and vengeance and religion and faith and the immigrant experience and the labor movement and being Jewish. Full of compelling and interesting characters, this story of a man possessed by a dybbuk in 1893 Chicago is also about the kind of romance you can have with a place, and as a reader who loves Chicago (and has read so, so many books set in New York as if New York is the only US city for historical fiction,), I thoroughly enjoyed running from the stockyards to the lake to the tenements to the mansions of the rich alongside the protagonists. And while there are thousands of books out there that deal in magical realism or the supernatural, it's much rarer to read works where the supernatural elements are distinctly Jewish, and author Polydoros has created a fantastic ghost story drawn from Ashkenazi folklore.