Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This should be right up the alley of all you folks who like epic family stories. You know, the whole generational thing with patriarchs (who happen to be expert con-men), children with special (albeit mild) psychical abilities, (read NOT X-MEN), and the difficulties of living in Chicago between the sixties and mid-nineties.

Mind you, we're dealing with mostly realistic stuff here. Tons of it is illusion tricks but this family is special, anyway, between truth-sensing, clairvoyance, and a minor trick of telekinesis. All in all, it's a story of failed romance in a normal family for the truth-sensor. Or being overburdened with foreknowledge when most of this life just sucks. In another case, it's being able to cheat the hell out of a pinball machine. Sometimes it even carries over to roulette. :)

This poor family has issues. Debunked publicly by a skeptic, forced to live normal lives, getting into crap MLM schemes, getting in trouble with the mob... there's a bit of everything going on here.

In reality, though, the focus is on the characters and the family and it plays out very satisfactorily by the end. I love a good heist novel even more than a familial epic, but fortunately, we've got both here. It was fun and requires a bit of patience and natural fascination for the minor psychical stuff as well as family epics, but if you've got that, this is well worth the read.

This happens to be the first novel of Gregory I've read. It's not bad. I'm curious how the others pan out now. :)

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