"With wit, tenderness, humour, and, startling beauty, Cary Fagan brings a gifted young man's rise to a peculiar kind of stardom, wonderfully alive. Growing up in a Jewish neighbourhood in the 1930s, young Benjamin Kleeman falls in love, first with Corrine Foster and then with magic. Hiding his new passions from his parents - the long-suffering Bella, an Italian immigrant, and Jacob, a talented but failed inventor of elaborate mechanical devices - Benjamin begins apprenticeships in magic and life itself, learning along the way that everything is more complicated than it seems."--Publisher.