12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
When a psychic with dubious psychic powers is suddenly blessed with true psychic powers, August 23, 2008
When Marina Marks, the heroine of "The Grift", was five years old, her mother takes her to a seaside tarot card reader and fortune teller named Madame Z to have her fortune read. Madame Z goes into a sort of trance, trembles, and tells the mother that the girl "has the gift", and that she will be a psychic with real psychic powers. But the mother is neither impressed with the drama and the show of Madame Z, nor does she believe her. She grabs her daughter and leaves the psychic in a hurry, muttering: "This crazy freak doesn't know what she's talking about."
Nevertheless, she buys a deck of tarot cards for Marina, and the girl starts using the cards first as a hobby, and learns very quickly that she can earn a decent income if she takes up fortune telling as her profession.
Marina tells fortunes mainly based on her intuition, and acute observations of her client's physical attributes such as mannerisms and demeanor. She even manages to earn reputation as a good psychic. A few years after her mother dies, however, Marina relocates from Florida to San Diego. Then she is astonished one day to discover that she had suddenly developed true psychic powers, and that in her visions she could see her clients' past, present and future very clearly. But she doesn't realize that she should use her new-found psychic powers with care and that she should also use tact and diplomacy while telling a client's fortune. Instead, she starts telling fortunes rather bluntly, thereby scaring her clients away. And her business, which she had carefully built up over the years, begins to slide down and disintegrate.
The novel has several interesting, well-drawn and well-developed characters such as Cooper, a handsome gay man in love with a closeted psychiatrist, and Madeline, a young gold-digger married to an old but fabulously rich man. Madeline thinks she can save her marriage by conceiving a child of this tycoon with roving eyes. And there is Rosa, a sympathetic woman who operates a beach side stand selling coffee, pastries and cookies. All these characters ring true to life, and are believable.
Written in simple but elegant prose, the novel builds up momentum slowly at first, and then begins to grip the readers mind, becoming brighter and funnier as it progresses, and then dazzles:
"It wasn't her way, for example, to go for a big score with a client and then never see that client again. Hers was a slow build of confidence and a fostering of need. Many of her clients treated her with the same deference to authority that they showed their doctors. Marina had always believed that it took more skill to develop trust than inspire fear. It paid better in the long run, too, and was much less likely to end with angry clients feeling as though they'd been shafted."
This charming, funny and very witty novel is at heart a conundrum. Marina's newly acquired psychic power should have boosted her fortune telling business. It should have been a blessing; instead it acts like a curse. Written with deep insight into human psychology and behavior, Debra Ginsberg's "The Grift" is a true marvel.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I've read all..., December 21, 2008
of Debra Ginsberg's work, three non-fiction books about her family and two stand-alone novels. The plot of The G(r)ift is best described by other reviewers, but I will note that the plot, the characters, and the good writing add up to a very good, hard-to-put down novel.
The "tag" lines suggested by the review model give "psychics", "suspense" and other like words to describe this work. I suppose it's all of that, but basically Ginsberg's writing comes down to simply an interesting story about people.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Top notch, August 22, 2008
A little girl with a neglectful, addicted mother meets a boardwalk gypsy who promptly tells the little girl she has "a gift." Fast forward 30 years, and we meet the little girl as a grown woman: Marina. Early in her life, Marina found that while the men her mom brought home might be tempted by a pretty little girl, a girl who was psychic frightened them. so she pretended -- and got so good at intuitively reading people that it became her career.
What happens when her Grift suddenly comes true, and she does indeed have the Gift? People don't want to know the truth. They want to hear that their dreams will come true. Her entire business is at risk, and the regulars she has worked with become hostile. This entire novel moves forward on this premise. This is not a mystery novel, but a novel about characters: their dreams, their motivations, their good traits and their bad.
This is an excellent book. Really surprisingly engaging. I recommend it without hesitation.
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