Walking the Labyrinth - Hardcover

Goldstein, Lisa

3.44

211 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312861753 ISBN 13: 9780312861759

Publisher: Tor Books, 1996

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Molly Travers, a young woman living in San Francisco, discovers that she is the descendant of a family of vaudeville magicians, who in the nineteenth century performed real magic with a group of occultists known as the Order of the Labyrinth.
As Molly investigates her past, richer and deeper magic enters her life. First she travels to England, where the trail leads her to an estate once owned by a rich, eccentric widow who believed in the supernatural and had her own personal medium - Molly's great-grandmother. Underneath the house, in the enormous cellar, the widow's fortune was spent constructing a labyrinth to Molly's great-grandmother's specifications.
Beneath the house the labyrinth awaits, seemingly untouched by the hundred years that have passed since it was built. Molly enters its passages and there everything changes. The labyrinth, and the secrets it contains, will bring Molly face-to-face with magic, mystery, and murder, changing her life forever.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Contemporary fantasy, San Franciscoset, about young drifter Molly Travers and her large, mysterious family. Private investigator John Stow has been hired--he won't reveal by whom--to inquire about Fentrice Allalie, the great-aunt who raised Molly after her parents died in an auto accident. Fentrice's family toured in the old vaudeville days, presenting an outstanding magic show. According to Fentrice, Callan, Molly's grandfather, is dead; of another sister, Thorne, Fentrice oddly denies all knowledge. Learning that the family originally came from England, John and Molly visit the old home, where John discovers a book--a confession--written by Fentrice's mother, Emily; she had the Gift and could work real magic. Back in San Francisco, John reveals that his client is Samuel, an uncle Molly never knew she had. At Samuel's house, she finds Callan, not the least bit dead, and dozens of other relatives, most of whom can also work real magic. But Molly still puzzles over Thorne, who disappeared mysteriously in 1935. Did Fentrice murder her? And what of Molly herself: Does she have psychic powers too? A deftly woven, engrossing who-dun-what: despite some intrusively didactic patches, Goldstein's best outing since A Mask for the General (1987). -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Contemporary fantasy isn't Goldstein's forte. Her historical and otherworldly reveries (Summer King, Winter Fool, etc.) can dazzle, but the modern world seems to confound her storytelling in this novel set in today's San Francisco, just as it did in Tourists (1989). Here, odd-job typist Molly Travers is searching for her mysterious ancestors. Through a series of increasingly unlikely coincidences, she learns that she is a descendant of the Allalie clan. Originally adepts of the 19th-century English Order of the Labyrinth, the Allalies migrated in the 1930s to the American vaudeville stage, where they used their assorted extrasensory talents to "change people's lives." Molly's journey takes her on a magical mystery tour, but it's one in which Goldstein fumbles the cards and drops the white rabbit on the floor. Her prose is flat and arhythmic, with the many family diaries and letters that Molly discovers revealing the author's ignorance of Victorian locution. The characters are simple, and the plotting is obvious. There's some charm to Molly's discovery of magic in the everyday world, but it's not enough to make this one of Goldstein's memorable outings. Hopefully her next will forsake our world for a more enchanted one.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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