FEBRUARY 2008
A REVIEW OF
The Invention of Everything Else
by Samantha Hunt
CENTRAL QUESTION: Had he not died, could the world’s greatest inventor have solved the problem of death?
Format: 272 pp, cloth; Price: $24.00; Size: 6" x 9"; Editor: Anjali Singh; Cover design: Peter Mendelsund; Interior design: Melissa Lofty; Typeface: Whitman; Inventions discussed in novel: airplanes, fluorescent lighting, time machines; Celebrity guest appearances in novel: Thomas Edison, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Muir, Mark Twain; Job author once held: data entry at a Raptor Center, where “people brought in all manner of injured songbirds”; Representative sentence: “For one fraction of a second they are progress soaring above the world, brief and beautiful, a fraction of a second before progress crashes them back down to Earth.”
In just two novels, Samantha Hunt has already proven herself a master of beautiful delusions. Her characters are invariably dreamers, inventors, and casters of great, strange spells, imaginative people who demand imaginative books. In her surreal 2004 debut, The Seas, a lovelorn teenage girl believes she’s a mermaid destined to save a Gulf War veteran. This second, more realistic turn also features a lonely girl, as well as the creative juggernauts of New York City and Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla. The result is a smart, colorful novel about aspiration and wish fulfillment in a world even the best engineers can’t control.

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—Katherine Hill

Katherine Hill once got lost in the Hotel New Yorker. She now lives and writes in Philadelphia.
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