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Jeffrey Ford

The Girl in the Glass: A Novel Paperback – Bargain Price, August 16, 2005

by Jeffrey Ford (Author)

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The Great Depression has bound a nation in despair -- and only a privileged few have risen above it: the exorbitantly wealthy ... and the hucksters who feed upon them. Diego, a seventeen-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant, owes his salvation to master grifter Thomas Schell. Together with Schell's gruff and powerful partner, they sail comfortably through hard times, scamming New York's grieving rich with elaborate, ingeniously staged séances -- until an impossible occurrence changes everything.

While "communing with spirits," Schell sees an image of a young girl in a pane of glass, silently entreating the con man for help. Though well aware that his otherworldly "powers" are a sham, Schell inexplicably offers his services to help find the lost child -- drawing Diego along with him into a tangled maze of deadly secrets and terrible experimentation.

At once a hypnotically compelling mystery and a stunningly evocative portrait of Depression-era New York, The Girl in the Glass is a masterly literary adventure from a writer of exemplary vision and skill.

Print length

286 pages
Language

English
Publisher

William Morrow Paperbacks
Publication date

August 16, 2005
Dimensions

5.31 x 0.69 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0060936193
ISBN-13

978-0060936198
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Off-beat, thoroughly researched . . . [Ford has] crafted an engaging read.” (Publishers Weekly )

“You may gallop through [THE GIRL IN THE GLASS] for entertainment, but it will go on to haunt you.” (Locus )

“Schell [is] an intriguing scoundrel, as if Sherlock Holmes had a Moriarity taint in his gene pool.” (Kirkus Reviews )

“THE GIRL IN THE GLASS grabbed me and wouldn’t let go . . . A spellbinding story, splendidly told.” (Globe and Mail (Toronto) )

About the Author

Jeffrey Ford is the author of three previous story collections and eight previous novels, including the Edgar^® Award-winning The Girl in the Glass and the Shirley Jackson Award-winning The Shadow Year. A former professor of writing and early American literature, Ford now writes full-time in Ohio, where he lives with his wife.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000GG4Z7C
Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Morrow Paperbacks (August 16, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 286 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060936193
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060936198
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.69 x 8 inches

Customer Reviews:
136 ratings

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Jeffrey Ford

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Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels, Vanitas, The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year, The Twilight Pariah, Ahab's Return, Or The Last Voyage, and Out of Body. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer's Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, A Natural History of Hell, and The Best of Jeffrey Ford from PS, Big Dark Hole, 2021, from Small Beer Press. Ford has published well over 100 short stories, which have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. He is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, Nebula, Shirley Jackson Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire (France), Hayakawa Award (Japan). His fiction has been translated into about 20 languages. In addition to writing, he’s been a professor of literature and writing for 30 years and has been a guest lecturer at Clarion Writing Workshop, The Stone Coast MFA Program, The Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and the Antioch University Writing Workshop. He lives in Ohio and currently teaches part time at Ohio Wesleyan University.

Link to Ford's homepage -- http://www.well-builtcity.com/

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5

136 global ratings

5 star		46%
4 star		35%
3 star		13%
2 star		4%
1 star		2%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Cheryl

Interesting historical mystery

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 15, 2022

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What starts as a story about a trio of con men bilking the rich during the Great Depression turns into a murder mystery involving secret eugenics research and experimentation. Great details capture what was going on in America at the time.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 2, 2012

Verified Purchase

A friend who had become interested in a genre novel of mine, began singing the praises of Ford's novels, and mostly out of politeness, I decided to download one as an e-book and give it a read. I'm glad I did.

There's nothing literarily splendid about Ford's prose here, but then I doubt such was intended. Instead, Ford is a spellbinding storyteller. His prose, while somewhat generic, flows like butter, and you can't help but turn page after page. There's a wink and a nod to postmodern sensibilities, however, because the principal characters, protagonists and antagonists, have multiple identities, and he does a bit of deconstructing of early twentieth-century America.
The main three characters, Diego, Henry, and Thomas are con men, you see, thriving on that fin de siecle preoccupation of the wealthy: spiritualism. Following a seance, Thomas seems to have seen a girl's image in a window, and five days later the same girl was reported dead. Our three cons decide to investigate the death - gratis. As you might suspect, the story takes all sorts of turns, but the most surprising element is Ford's take on the U.S.`s Eugenics movement, which preceded Hitler's persecution of minorities and World War II. The author is hardly ham-handed in bringing this disgraceful moment of U.S. history to the fore; instead, it's worked seamlessly into the plot and characterizations.
And as you might expect, the characters, while engaging, are given short shrift until story's end, and if I were to offer a single change to the book, it would be to present this end-of-story dwelling on character much earlier, perhaps at the beginning.

This is a fun read, but it informs as easily as it entertains. Ford has clearly mastered his genre.

5 people found this helpful

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Colt

Wonderful!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 8, 2022

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Dark and funny in equal measure, this is a novel which begs to be a movie and will leave a lasting imprint on your mind.

-Colt Leasure, Writer

Helpful

Richard Bowes

SCAMS AND BUTTERFLIES

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 17, 2005

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Writing this, I'm torn between describing the strengths of this elegant and compelling novel or just telling you that there are still a few weeks of summer left and that The Girl In The Glass will be the beach book of your dreams.

Ford catches the spirit of The Thin Man, both Hammett's novel and the Powell/Loy movies that followed, and mixes that with deft dashes of magic and some darker tones. Set in the bitter Depression year of 1932 on a Long Island from which the Great Gatsby would have only recently departed, the novel catches the special mystery of a lost time and place where rural back roads, led to lavish beach-front estates and liquor smuggling was a local industry.

Young Diego, a Mexican immigrant, is a wonderfully engaging narrator. Through him we see Thomas Schell and Anthony Cleopatra, a master con man and his assistant, making hay among the well to do and easily fooled. Then, in the middle of a phony séance, Schell, a dealer in sleight-of-hand, a collector of exotic butterflies sees the inexplicable reflection of a girl on a pane of glass. Against a backdrop of kidnapping and murder, both Diego and Schell find romance and the fly underworld of carnival freaks and flim-flam collides with the deeply disturbing one of eugenics cults.

I came to love this little band of scam artists enough that I was sorry when the pages ran out and the book ended. In summer or in any other season, I think you'll love them too.

30 people found this helpful

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Hank Lajoie

Unlikely Heroes

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 4, 2018

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Con men, carnival people in 1932 America were still able to “make a killing” off the fortunate wealthy. In this story, the seance is the major tool of a master con man and his young protege, an illegal Mexican refugee who poses as a young Hindu mystic. A perfect opportunity presents itself when a young girl goes missing. Her wealthy parents are suckers for the occult seance of this group and what begins as the usual money making scam turns into a murder mystery. Not only is the young girl a murder victim, the “mystics” find themselves embroiled in a series of events that uncover weird biological experiments by a sinister group of wealthy individuals who sound like precursors to the Nazi movement in later years. A thoroughly entertaining read.

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ladymaria

Can we connect with the other side?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 31, 2016

Verified Purchase

It was a little slow in the beginning, but in retrospect it was needed to tell where these people were at the start of the book. Each one carried a lot of baggage from life. They all had reasons for making their living the way they did, conning people. They fooled people for money. It showed that there are redeeming qualities in every one, rich or poor, good or bad.The girl he saw was real and he wanted more answers. It led to an explanation that no one liked, and endangered their lives. I guess the characters are like onions. You unwind them one layer at a time, but in the end, good things come to people who deserve it. Very entertaining!

One person found this helpful

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LC

Never read anything like it before!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 17, 2020

Verified Purchase

Not wanting to give anything away to spoil the story for readers, simply know that this was quite a trip! This was a fascinating, funny, "never saw that coming" kind of story. Don't miss it. One character used foul language, but that word can just be ignored!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 24, 2016

Verified Purchase

I was absorbed from the first paragraph in Girl in the Glass and was engrossed till the end. Ford does a good job of depicting Depression era Long Island. The narrator, an illegal immigrant orphan, has a surrogate training him in con games. A band of unusual characters serves as his family. Did the surrogate father, Thomas Schell, really see a missing girl in the window pane? In searching for her, the unusual "family" uncovers a KKK plan to eliminate all who are not part of a pure "Master Race". A thoroughly enjoyable book; I was sorry when the book ended.

4 people found this helpful

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The Girl in the Glass: A Novel Paperback – Bargain Price, August 16, 2005

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