This pic­ture book, writ­ten by Barb Rosen­stock and illus­trat­ed by Mar Del­mar, reveals the fas­ci­nat­ing and lit­tle-known sto­ry of how Houdini’s enchant­ment with books shaped the course of his life in magic.

Rosen­stock opens with Hou­di­ni in his late adult life relax­ing, book in hand, at home in Harlem. Down below, a crowd has gath­ered in the hope that he will appear. She then takes us back to Harry’s child­hood as Erik Weisz in Hun­gary, where his rab­bi father kept his own library of per­haps one hun­dred books. From there, the time­line rolls for­ward, trac­ing the magician’s life in rela­tion to books. 

When Erik was four, his father moved the fam­i­ly with all his pre­cious books to Apple­ton, Wis­con­sin. Rosen­stock writes of the sad­ness Erik (now called Ehrie) felt when his father lost his

posi­tion as a rab­bi there and moved east, book by book sell­ing off the col­lec­tion that Ehrie

had grown to love, too. Need­ing work, Ehrie cut fab­ric in a tie fac­to­ry. One day he picked up a ten-cent biog­ra­phy of the famous magi­cian Jean Robert-Houdin. That sparked Ehrie to acquire more and more used books to study and prac­tice mag­ic. He quit the fac­to­ry to per­form mag­ic acts as Har­ry Hou­di­ni. Over time, he became more adept and wild­ly pop­u­lar for escap­ing from myr­i­ad dra­mat­i­cal­ly locked chains, con­tain­ers, and sit­u­a­tions. He per­formed around the world, trav­el­ing with numer­ous books and always on the look­out for more. Back in New York, Har­ry hired a librar­i­an to help him con­tin­ue to build and keep his enor­mous library — which totaled almost fif­teen thou­sand print­ed mate­ri­als about mag­ic — in his own house.

There is sophis­ti­ca­tion of lan­guage and art in this book and that makes it appro­pri­ate for chil­dren old­er than the age the pub­lish­er sug­gests. A very young read­er may think Hou­di­ni is still alive due to Rosenstock’s choice to open the book by pre­sent­ing the man Hou­di­ni in the present tense. They may miss the mean­ing of unde­fined words and expres­sions like ​“prej­u­dice” or ​“year after change­less year” in her spare text, but will total­ly under­stand the large ​“Free” when Hou­di­ni releas­es him­self from a seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble bind. 

Rosenstock’s and Delmar’s verve and care in the research and pre­sen­ta­tion of their sub­ject cap­ti­vate. The book ends with a two-page author’s note con­tain­ing addi­tion­al his­tor­i­cal notes on Houdini’s col­lec­tion and his life, along with online resources and a bib­li­og­ra­phy of select­ed sources. The illus­tra­tor fol­lows with a two-page note, com­plete with details and pho­tos about how she drew, cut, paint­ed, and lit char­ac­ters and scenes for the 3‑D dio­ra­ma con­struc­tion that became the book’s art. Read­ers of many ages will leave entranced by Houdini’s show­man­ship and by this book.