The Curators is such an interesting and inventive debut.
Imagine a young and successful man soon to be finding himself being wrongfully accused of rape mainly because of the collective Jewish resentment around the time.
Imagine Atlanta as the backdrop.
The imagine a group of young girls joining their powers to bring justice.
Now imagine all of this weaved with fantasy.

I enjoyed the concept, the writing and the golem. 4.5 for those
The pacing and structure, the plot and characterisation 4 stars.

A dark, lyrical blend of historical fiction and magical realism, The Curators examines a critically underexplored event in American history through unlikely eyes. All of Atlanta is obsessed with the two-year-long trial and subsequent lynching of Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank in 1915. None more so than thirteen-year-old Ana Wulff and her friends, who take history into their own hands—quite literally—when they use dirt from Ana’s garden to build and animate a golem in Frank’s image. They’ll do anything to keep his story alive, but when their scheme gets out of hand, they must decide what responsibility requires of them. The Curators tells the story of five zealous girls and the cyclonic power of their friendship as they come of age in a country riven by white supremacy.

1915 Atlanta was less interested in the war in Europe, instead the newspapers and conversations were focused on the case of Leo Frank. Frank, a Jewish industrialist was accused of murdering his thirteen year old employee, Mary Phagan. He would be murdered by a lynch mob in 1917. This infamous case forms the central narrative thread of The Curators told through the experiences of a small group of Jewish teenagers who become obsessed with the case. They developing their own club and collection that they curate, it centered on Frank with rules such as wearing a locket with his image at all times. And at his death, they consider how to both protect themselves and their family and maybe revenge too.

How do you respond to your community killing someone with the same faith as you? What of the mythical forces you might be able to call upon? Both coming of age and historical fiction, Nye writers first through a collective voice of the five girls, before shifting to naive and impetus Ana Wulff’s story. All of girls are Jewish and don’t fit in with their peers, marked as other. But at least they have their group. Through Frank’s life they see the way a community can turn against one they feel has trespassed beyond their place or threatened the status quo.

It’s clear a lot of research and thought went in to the creation of this book and the writing is very lyrical and imaginative. The true story inspiration is one of America’s shameful episodes. However, the interesting approach of the collective voice is not maintained, and the book shifts from something unique to a more standard coming of age story, but with clear consequences.

Recommended to readers of female centered coming of age stories, historical fiction or stories with events that question if there is magic or it’s all in your (narrator’s) head.

I can't finish reading this title because the digital copy is missing all the instances of "th" and "ff" and fi" presumably because of the font choice in the final manuscript. I was able to figure out the gist of the writing for a couple chapters but ultimately have to abandon it for illegibility.

I think I enjoyed the concept of this novel and Nye's probing, nuanced way of thinking about her subjects a bit more than actually reading the book: the circular, non-progressive narrative which circles and intertwines is absolutely the right form and shape for the material and approach - and yet it's that very stasis, repetition and form that started to drag down my enjoyment. The typography, in particular, came between me and the story: the main narrative in regular font, the group-voice of the girls in italics tired me both visually and in terms of engagement with the text.

That said, Nye has found a creative way of re-opening a tale of racism, anti-Semitism, violence, America, female adolescence and questions over story-telling and narrative. The underlying case of Mary Phagan and Leo Frank is worth Googling before you start reading this as it's more a kind of extended intertext to this story than the central matter of the book. And the adolescent girls at the heart of this tale reminded me of The Crucible, though with a more sympathetic approach to the girls which doesn't make them more metaphor than 'real'.

Nye's writing is often striking on both the sentence and figurative level: I was especially struck by the image of the five girls intertwined like a spider, conjuring up all those adolescent limbs and the way teenage girls cleave to each other. The use of real-life newspapers and other documents is adroit and the whole thing is nicely provocative, leaning towards openness rather than closing down the story to some kind of spurious and neat conclusion.

So without doubt an imaginative way of straddling cultural fissures and lines between the past and present - yet somehow I didn't gel with this in quite the satisfactory way that I expected.

3-3.5 stars, rounded up.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press for an ARC of this novel.

This is an imaginative retelling of a real historical case, the murder of 12 year old pencil factory worker Mary Phagan in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 1913. The accused, 29 year old Leo Frank, factory superintendent, had married into a prominent local Jewish family. Handsome, wealthy and well-educated, he was a symbol of Jewish success—and a magnet for anti-semitic resentment. Charged with rape and murder, he maintained his innocence throughout his trial and incarceration. He was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. Two years later he was kidnapped from jail and lynched by a mob that evidently contained some well known citizens, a fate that, until the Frank case, had been reserved for Black men.

The case divided the city’s Jewish residents. While they saw it for the blatant antisemitism that it was, those of the respectable middle class were proudly assimilated Americans. Many feared drawing attention to themselves and their own families, all too aware of to stand up for
Frank. Whether American-born or immigrants, they were all too aware of the pogroms of Europe and the centuries of persecution behind them. Jewish children, from a very young age, were told the various versions of the legend of the golem, the clay figure given life by Rabbi Loew In the 16th century to protect the Jews of Prague. It was a cautionary tale about survival. The golem story, in its own strange way, figures strongly in the narrative.

The perspective is that of young Ana Wulff, only daughter of a prosperous Jewish textiles manufacturer, whose doting, indulgent parents are at once obsessive about her health and safety and yet mostly oblivious to what she and her ´girl gang’ are up to. On the verge of 14, in the most liminal and fraught of life stages, Ana and her friends become fixated on Frank and Phagan. Really, they are fixated on the sensationalized newspaper coverage, especially in the racist Atlanta Constitution, a real newspaper that the author draws on frequently, as she does on Ana’s fictive personal diary. The juxtaposition of the two, and the often hilarious references to ladies’ magazines, effectively suggest how mass media was infiltrating young minds even in the early 20th century. But resistance is also demonstrated in the girls’ take on the case. Ana and her four close friends make Frank a strange idol, not so much as a victim of race hatred. but for the qualities that spark their adolescent imaginings about love, gender, and sex, ‘virtue,’ responsibility, and growing up in a society fractured by race, class and gender hostility.

Ana’s gang members are deliberately blurred to emphasize their group identity—often, reference to individuals becomes ‘one of us said…’, and they are frequently likened to a five headed spider, thinking, moving, even sleeping with legs entwined. But Ana is always in the forefront. She is the creative one, the subversive, the one who most tests the many rigid confines of her time and place.

This is not a traditional historical fiction that reimagines ´what happened when. ´ Nye interweaves religion, tradition, ritual and legend, with magical realism and satire to capture both the unreasoning and evil elements of history and the intemperate sensitivities of adolescent girls. The writing is excellent. The plotting is complicated, and I had to read the ending a few times, but those can also be seen as the novel’s worthwhile challenges.

Received an ARC from NetGalley

At times a bit confusing (perhaps this is because I was unfamiliar with the Mary Phaghan murder - i have since researched it and am better informed), but the writing and the fairy tale like qualities of the story kept me mesmerized. I love stories written from the pov of young girls - especially if that story involves magical thinking and is infused with religion and folklore. If you enjoy those things as well, this book may be for you.

I did not know what to expect but was intrigued by the idea - a series of interlinking vignettes that illustrate race and class hierarchies through a blend of historical fiction and magical realism. At times thought-provoking, at times visceral. This innovative narrative did not disappoint.

I wasn't always sure what to make of this, at times wonderful, and thought provoking, at other times I felt confused.
It's different, it's interesting, but I'm not sure I fully understood every bit of it.
I'd still recommend though.

Maggie Nye’s intense, inventive debut novel blends history with fantasy and folklore to form an exceptionally vivid portrait of Atlanta during the indictment and subsequent lynching of Jewish business manager Leo Frank. In 1913 Frank – formally pardoned in the 1980s – was convicted of the brutal rape and murder of thirteen-year-old employee Mary Phagan. In Nye’s retelling, five Jewish girls, the same age as Phagan when she died, become obsessed with Phagan and with saving Frank. Atlanta’s atmosphere of simmering violence and growing antisemitism means the girls have been warned to keep together for their own safety like “chewing gum on a seat.” But their inseparability has resulted in a loss of personal and physical boundaries, so that at times they seem to melt into each other. Their collective struggle to comprehend a world in which fragments of rope used to kill Frank are openly sold on local streets leads the girls to take refuge in magic – partly stirred by references to witchcraft in the “murder notes” found next to Phagan’s body. Remembering bedtime stories of the fantastical golem created by Prague’s Jewish community to ward off horrific persecution, the girls decide to conjure their own. A creature who can avenge Frank and, perhaps even, Phagan.

Presented as a series of interlinking vignettes which highlight issues of scapegoating and expose Atlanta’s complex hierarchies of race and class, Nye’s narrative gradually takes on a sinister fairy tale quality. Nye’s work often centres on girlhood from short fiction to accounts of her own fascination with crimes like the Slender Man teen stabbing. Here, in the spirit of Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Tayari Jones’s Leaving Atlanta, Nye explores the moment between childhood and adolescence in a time of crisis: questions of knowledge and experience, identification and projection, and children’s perceptions of the adult world. She reflects too on the stories children construct to make sense of what’s happening to, and around, them.

Nye extends her gaze to take in notions of truth versus falsity, how events alter through retelling: history mutating into myth; facts twisted to support their tellers’ agendas. Something that’s particularly significant in relation to Frank and Phagan. It’s said that Leo Frank’s known to every American neo-Nazi - his slaughter directly connected to the KKK’s resurgence in 1915. His case’s relentlessly rehashed on numerous white supremacist sites where Phagan’s worshipped as the ultimate white martyr and Frank cast as symbol of “Jewish evil” linked to everything from “blood libel” to diabolical international conspiracies – like the golem Frank and Phagan are raw material reshaped into mystical, mythical figures in support of the neo-Nazi cause. A development anticipated and carefully countered in Nye’s narrative. Debut novels are notorious for being uneven and this is no exception. But it’s also richly imagined packed with arresting images, with stretches I found close to mesmerising.