Title: All dressed up and nowhere to go
Product review: It is a somewhat hazardous task for a novelist to write about the nature of magic, deception and illusion, because the readers will definitely expect to be pleasantly deceived. Martyn Bedford's ambitious Houdini Girl is therefore the most anti-climactic novel of 1999, since it deals with the questions of deception and magic but desperately fails to conjure up any kind of wonder in the reader. There is a interesting subtext on how the mastery of magic is akin to male dreams of mastery over women in general, but it cannot make up for weaknesses in plot (ludicrous) and language (crude).
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