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Heir To The Glimmering World
A Novel
by Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozick's complex novel, set in Depression-era New York, centers on an 18-year old orphan and the eccentric family of German exiles who take her in.
Houghton Mifflin, 320 pages
09/01/2004
$24.00
ISBN: 0618470492
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
NOTES:
Also known as "The Bear Boy" in the UK.
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Booklist Donna Seaman
A work of scintillating intelligence and supple imagination. [Jul 2004, p.1800]
Boston Globe Jessica Treadway
A tour de force of a vision and voice that reflect a compassionate intelligence we are most fortunate to have in our world, which inevitably glimmers when Ozick gets hold of it.
Chicago Sun-Times Natalie Danford
Heir to the Glimmering World is just as smart as Ozick's earlier books, but it's also funny and witty and engaging on a pure what-will-happen-next level.
Chicago Tribune Katharine Weber
Ozick is an ingenious and truly original writer whose complete control of her material contrasts marvelously with the hectic and layered events that seem to threaten chaos at every other moment in the novel.
Kirkus Reviews
One of Ozick's most interesting and challenging books. [1 Jul 2004, p.600]
Publishers Weekly
Edifying and evocative, if often daunting, this is a concentrated slice of eccentric life. [9 Aug 2004, p.228]
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Annabel Lyon
There is a deep logic to Ozick's intellectual wanderings that lifts her books from whimsy to wonder.
The New York Times Book Review John Leonard
Typically audacious... ''Heir to the Glimmering World'' is both a chambered nautilus and a haunted house -- a fairy tale with locked rooms, mad songs, secret books and stolen babies.
Wall Street Journal Merle Rubin
Lavish in invention and ideas, yet superbly controlled as a work of narrative art, "Heir to the Glimmering World" has all the hallmarks of a permanent work of literature.
The Guardian Ali Smith
The Bear Boy is sparky, mischievous, witty, dazzlingly clever, properly dimensional, and written with such calmness so close to the foulness of history as to seem somehow beyond the world, almost mercilessly self-assured.
The Spectator John de Falbe
Besides being full of intellectual riches, The Bear Boy is witty and moving: I hope it achieves the success it deserves.
The Independent Paul Bailey
As exciting and diverting as anything she has written.
Daily Telegraph Lewis Jones
It is a lively and compelling book, written with conspicuous beauty.... But though I enjoyed much of the story, and was gripped by it, by the end I found it increasingly contrived and unsatisfying.
London Review Of Books Theo Tait
Unlike some of Ozick’s earlier work, it is never choked by the ideas. It remains fluid and lifelike, rather than clotted and diagrammatic.
Houston Chronicle Patrick Kurp
As always, Ozick's prose glistens with intelligence (and echoes of Henry James and Saul Bellow).
Daily Telegraph George Walden
All this may sound a bit static, and sometimes it is: for long stretches of the story we are shut up in a house in the Bronx with this peculiar family, while nothing much happens. It is Cynthia Ozick's achievement that the atmosphere she builds in this claustrophobic environment makes her tale somehow compelling.
Washington Post James Sallis
A wise, quietly magical book.
The New Yorker
Ozick portrays this ramshackle household to dazzling effect.
The New Republic Ruth Franklin
The delight of Ozick's intellectual puzzles cannot entirely compensate for the book's faults.
The New York Times Richard Eder
Ozick's particular artistry... is one that floats out from the heaviness of the human condition and lightens it, as it did in the Puttermesser novel and does here, with the Mitterwissers and their innocent chronicler, Rose. When it attempts to portray lightness, it forces itself.
San Francisco Chronicle Sarah Coleman
Ozick is an intellectual magpie, and she squeezes so much into this novel that it's hard to tell which of her sparkly treasures should take precedence over the others.
Library Journal Starr E. Smith
This witty book will appeal to admirers of the fanciful tales in Ozick's Puttermesser Papers and to readers seeking well-written novels with intellectual depth. [Jul 2004, p.73]
New York Observer Daniel Asa Rose
Sentence for sentence, her sense of place crackles with imperial, almost gleeful power.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
While every strand of this hugely ambitious novel is strange and original, Ozick never quite manages to pull them all together.
 The average user rating for this book is 9.0 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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