What happens when you take one of fantasy's oldest archetypes — the golem — and drop it into the most horrific real-world setting imaginable?
I was up way too late reorganizing my board game shelf (a quarterly ritual that takes four hours and accomplishes nothing) when I decided to start this one. Ten hours later, my shelf was still half-sorted and I was sitting on the floor next to a stack of Gloomhaven boxes, genuinely shaken. This is not a book I expected to hit me this hard.
A Golem in the Holocaust Is Not the Pitch I Expected to Work
Look, I'm the guy who will defend a 1,200-page Sanderson tome and argue that hard magic systems are peak fiction. So Alice Hoffman's approach to magic here threw me off at first. There's no Ars Arcanum in the back of this book. The closest I've come to that same disorientation — picking up a book expecting one kind of magic and getting something that operates on completely different emotional logic — was reading Towers of Midnight, though Sanderson at least has the decency to include a glossary. The golem Ava isn't governed by thermodynamic laws or mana pools — she's created through Kabbalistic tradition by Ettie, a rabbi's daughter who learned the old ways by listening at doors she wasn't supposed to be behind. And the magic works precisely because it's soft, because it's rooted in faith and desperation rather than rules. A mother is about to lose her twelve-year-old daughter to the Nazis, and she needs a protector. The golem exists because love demands it.
That's not Sanderson-level world-building, but it's something maybe more unsettling — magic that feels like prayer, invoked in a world where prayer isn't being answered.
The three women at the center — Hanni, Lea, and Ava — are bound together in ways that keep folding back on each other as the war progresses. Hoffman structures the story almost like interlocking fairy tales, each chapter reading like a fable nested inside the larger horror of occupied France and Nazi Germany. There's a heron that appears as an omen. There are references to the Angel of Death that feel less like metaphor and more like a character waiting in the wings. If you don't like info-dumps, this isn't for you (but you're wrong) — though honestly, Hoffman's style isn't info-dump so much as incantation. She repeats images and phrases until they take on weight.
Judith Light Goes Full Theater Kid (and It Mostly Works)
Okay, here's the thing about Judith Light's narration: she performs this book like she's on a Broadway stage, alone in a spotlight, daring the audience to look away. Her delivery is intensely dramatic — the dialogue lands with this sharp, almost breathless urgency that pulls you forward through scenes of genuine brutality. When Hanni makes her impossible choice to send Lea away, Light's voice cracks with a theatrical precision that somehow still feels earned.
But — and I say this as someone who thinks Steven Pacey walked so other narrators could run — there are moments where Light's distinctive voice becomes the thing you're noticing instead of the story. It's a very specific instrument. Rich, commanding, unmistakable. During the quieter passages, the fairy-tale interludes about herons and gardens and the nature of souls, her intensity doesn't always dial down to match. It's like she's narrating every paragraph at a 9 out of 10 when some of them need a 5.
That said? For the subject matter — the Holocaust, the desperate flight through France, the violence that Hoffman doesn't flinch from describing — that theatrical energy works more often than it doesn't. The magical realism elements especially benefit. When Ava's nature as a golem is discussed, when her limitations and her strange inner life are explored, Light makes it feel less like fantasy exposition and more like oral tradition being passed down. She sells the mythic register.
My D&D Group Would Argue About Ava for Hours
Ava is the character that stuck with me. She's a construct — essentially an NPC given sentience and a single directive: protect Lea. But Hoffman keeps pushing at the edges of that premise. Can a golem love? Can she want things for herself? Can she disobey? If you've ever run a campaign where a player's familiar or summoned creature starts developing personality, you know the philosophical territory here. Ava is basically a PC who discovers she has agency in a world that insists she doesn't.
The final pages are devastating. I won't spoil it, but the resolution of Ava's arc asks a question about sacrifice that I genuinely didn't expect from a book I picked up on a whim. I read this instead of writing my thesis. No regrets.
Who Gets a Seat at This Table
If you want hard magic systems and epic battles, this isn't your book. If you want a quiet, mythic, deeply sad story about what people create when the world is being destroyed around them — and you can handle Judith Light's full-throttle dramatic delivery — this is genuinely special. Fans of Guy Gavriel Kay's historical fantasy approach will find something to love here, though Hoffman's style is more fable than epic. The progression is satisfying, but it's emotional progression, not power scaling.
Content warning: Holocaust violence is depicted directly. It's not gratuitous, but it's unflinching.
Ten hours well spent. My thesis remains unwritten. Dr. Patel remains concerned.
