They want to make their dinners disappear and their parents vanish. Children want to be able to escape their rooms when they are sent there for being bad. Lock him up in a jail, handcuffed and helpless, in any city in the world - Moscow, New York, Vienna, Paris, or Providence Houdini will escape.Įveryone was wonderstruck by Houdini, but children were especially delighted. Bolt Houdini into a metal box and throw him in the water he will escape. Police from around the world couldn't keep him in their jails, and the oceans and the seas couldn't drown him.
Locks would fall open at his fingertips, and he could escape from ropes and chains and cabinets and coffins. He could pull rabbits from hats, make elephants disappear, and do a thousand card tricks. And it may even encourage kids to learn more about Houdini. But it's a pleasant enough story, and the boy's obsession is both amusing and will be recognizable to young readers. The text, however, is merely so-so, and requires a suspension of disbelief that not every reader will be willing to make - that Houdini's wife would give a child she'd never met, who had no relationship with her husband, his box of secrets, and that the child would so easily drop his dreams.
Selznick is truly one of our most brilliant and clever illustrators. Done in b&w crosshatching, they are rich, detailed, and occasionally impart emotional content not in the text. Selznick is the genius behind The Invention of Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures. The strength of this reissue of Brian Selznick's first book (with new notes about Houdini, magic, and the creation of the book) is the illustrations.
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