The Puzzle King Book

Here’s a memorable tale of two unlikely heroes: the lively, beautiful Flora and her husband, the brooding, studious Simon, two immigrants, both sent to America by their families to find a better life. An improbable match, they meet in New York City and fall in love. Simon—inventor of the jigsaw puzzle—eventually makes his fortune. Now wealthy, Flora and Simon become obsessed with rescuing those they left behind in Europe, loved ones whose fates will be determined by growing anti-Semitism on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Puzzle King explores a fascinating moment in history with a cast of characters who endure with dignity, grace, and hope for the future.

Publishers Weekly

Carter (Swim to Me) mines her family history in this underwhelming novel that examines the lives and loves of Jewish immigrants in early 20th-century New York. Nine-year-old Simon Phelps is sent by his mother from Lithuania to America, where he grows up poor but ambitious on the Lower East Side. He meets German-born Flora Grossman, and their marriage and ascent into American success forms the linchpin for the familiar tales of immigrants vacillating between the New World and the Old. The interwoven stories of Flora and her sisters—Seema, the kept mistress of a WASP banker, and the somber Margot, who endures an austere life in post-WWI Germany—highlight the different paths for German-Jewish women. Meanwhile, Simon’s booming career in the advertising world is tempered by the grief he feels as he searches for his lost family, though his success enables him to plan a bold mission of salvation. Unfortunately, the narrative, while admirable in scope, feels too beholden to its source material, with the remote, speculative tone making this often feel more like a historian’s work than a novelist’s. (Aug.)