A review by landycole
The Confabulist by Steven Galloway

2.0

Meh...this book was just ok. It had a great premise but was confusing and all over the place. It jumped back and forth between the past and present, and between Houdini and the guy that supposedly killed him. With all the back and forth, it became very hard to relate to any of the characters or care how their lives turned out. I also thought there was a missed opportunity to not make the storyline more suspenseful. The chapters where Houdini was trapped in the cabinet for an hour could have been made into much more and really given this book a bit of mystery. Also, I didn't like that Houdini's wife was made out to be such a b**ch. Maybe she was that way in real life but for the sake of the book, the woman deserved a little sympathy (she was the one being cheated on, repeatedly, after all!). All in all, I'd say skip this one and wait for the History Channel mini series about the guy.