The Vanishers

I'm not even sure what to write about this. I'm not even sure what I just listened to. Interesting concept and the beginning had lots of potential, but didn't really go anywhere. Psychics, dead mothers, self analysis, mothers and daughters, meaning of life, and disappearing seem to be the main

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themes. Well written, but it's seemed to be a story that was building forever but never climaxed. Even the main character didn't seem to understand what was going on. By the end of the book I couldn't wait for it to end

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Not for Sale until March 2012. Now this one is still haunting me. Julia Severn is a student at an institute for gifted psychics. She is chosen to work for the acclaimed Madame Ackermann, but just as Julia begins to shine she quickly falls out of favor and is left with crippling illnesses after a

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psychic attack. She is forced to leave the school, but her gifts have not gone unnoticed and she is hired to find a missing person -- a controversial artist with possible connections to her own mother. All the stories intertwine amidst female rivalry, grief and death. Bizarre and entrancing. Recommended, especially if you are drawn to psychic stuff.

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Perhaps I was in the wrong state of mind, but I simply had trouble losing myself in this book. The characters did not grab me, and although the story seems like it would be an interesting one, when it came down to it I simply could not engage. I got about a third of the way through and I'm going to

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set it aside for now. May come back to it at another time.

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I bought this book because I really loved The Uses of Enchantment and The Effect of living backwards (not so much Mineral Palace) and I have reread them several times. I am sorry to say I was disappointed. While Julavits very succesfully explores female rivalry in her previous works, here the

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caharcter's motives seem fake, contrived. An excellent idea, but not such a good result.
I will be definitely buying and reading anything new from her, but this one just didn't do it for me.

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Imagine a world where psychic behavior is not only believed but admired and encouraged. There is formal training for those who show the aptitude, and those with the most talent are considered the rock stars of the industry. This is the world in which the curtains first open on to Julia Severn's

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life in Heidi Julavits' The Vanishers. Readers must quickly adapt to a story where everything is not as it appears on the surface. It can be confusing, difficult, horrifying, and at the same time intriguing.

Julia struggles to find her place in this world of psychics. She is a student of immense talent but afraid to let her talents outshine those of her mentor, Madame Ackermann. Once Madame Ackermann discovers the truth, the psychic attacks begin, and they are not pretty. Ms. Julavits spares no description of the physical ailments from which Julia suffers. It can be a bit much for the more squeamish readers.

The physical afflictions are an interesting counterpart to the mental investigations Julia eventually undertakes. Much of the novel occurs in Julia's mind, as she attempts to uncover the truth about her mother and what lead to her suicide as well as the mystery behind Dominique Varga. It is just as convoluted as one would imagine. Ghosts, astral clues, and other mystical mind games become a bit too much at times, as a reader searches for answers among the abstract. The truth, when it is finally uncovered, requires a reader's patience and a better part of one's imagination to understand and accept.

The Vanishers is a book that most readers will not enjoy, and through which even the most advanced readers will struggle to fully comprehend. It is not the cheeriest of novels and definitely redefines the traditional mother/daughter relationship. At the same time, there is something about it that keeps a reader's interest in spite of the need to suspend belief. Ms. Julavits must be commended for taking a chance on her subject matter, even if it will not be appreciated by popular culture.

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Julia Severn is coming to grips with her non-relationship with her mother who committed suicide when Julia was just one month old. Julia's father has not shared much information about her mother's personality, in part because he believes Julia can find and has found out anything she wants to know

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with her psychic abilities. However, Julia's mother's spirit refuses to let Julia intuit anything at all.

After leaving the Institute of Integrated Parapsychology aka the Workshop (somewhat in disgrace) and becoming progressively more physically ill to the point that she is basically a hermit, Julia meets Alwyn at work. Alwyn suggests that Julia's illness is not physical, but a psychic attack, and offers her a job opportunity that would benefit them both.

I was confused through a lot of this book because Julia was not necessarily reliable as the narrator; she was confused herself. Even though Julia is psychic and able to travel to other times and situations to divine information, she can't "read" the people she interacts with in order to know who to trust. That could be because she is sick, but I think she isn't good at that before she is psychically attacked.

The wording in this novel is way out there. The characters and narrator use such odd language, but for some reason it works. The Vanishers was a quick read and I liked it. This was another book that I picked up at the library because I liked the bright colors on the cover. I will definitely be looking for another book by Heidi Julavits.

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Sort of a Scientology vibe, but very strange.

I picked this book by the cover. I was obsessed by it, and I jumped at the chance to read it when it came available on my library's ebook site. That said, I found parts of the book to be compelling and other parts to be completely convoluted and confusing. I appreciate the writing style and

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descriptions of the author, but I just didn't appreciate the story at all. It really went on for much too long and didn't provide me with any real sense of completion. I found the plot and characters to be as confusing as the picture on the cover is to the story.

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A convoluted supernatural plot can’t compete with out of this world prose

I’m one of those reviewers who tends to start with a plot summary. So, I could tell you that this is the story of twenty-something Julia Severn, an “Initiate of Promise” at the Institute of Integrated Parapsychology.

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The novel begins by detailing Julia’s complex and troubled relationship with her mentor, Madame Ackerman. Their problems may stem from the mentor’s fear of being supplanted by the protégé, or perhaps they’re due to Ackerman’s resemblance to Julia’s mother who committed suicide when Julia was an infant. For these reasons (and others), things sour, but their separation plagues Julia physically. She leaves school and spends the next year seeking a medical explanation for her physical decline. None is forthcoming until an odd girl literally trips into her life and explains that she’s under “psychic attack.” Offers of both help and employment are proffered.

And that—as they say—is just the beginning. The plot of this novel felt like a game of Three Card Monty, with constantly shifting character identities and allegiances. I didn’t read this novel because the description of the plot interested me. Ghosts, psychics, astral projections? Definitely not my cup of tea. However, a book about mother-daughter relationships and other female rivalries? Now you’re talking! And that’s very much what Heidi Julavits delivered. The whole psychic thing was merely the backdrop against which every type of mother-daughter drama imaginable was displayed.

And all this talk of “drama” sounds dramatic, and some of it was. But a lot of it was very, very funny. And even more of it was weird. And some of it was just plain confusing. I stand by my Three Card Monty analogy. But through it all was Heidi Julavits’ sparkling language. So much of language is merely functional. And, sure basic communication is a good goal. But the sentences of this novel were full of surprises and unexpected turns. They communicated, but they also delighted in a way that is truly rare. This is the sort of novel that leaves me wondering, “Why haven’t I read this author before?” I know there’s another book somewhere on the shelf. I will be digging it up, because Ms. Julavits has charmed me utterly with her inventive use of language. Plot, in this case, was almost immaterial.

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This is a 3.67 star review.

I can totally understand why other reviewers did not like Heidi Julavits' The Vanishers. A yound woman named Julia Severin, love that surmame, is studying at The Workshop, which is a post graduate study for psychics.

Julia has some issues, to say the least: she is left in

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an emotional void due to her mother's suicide when she was only a month old, her father is emotionally responsive and perfers to keep mum about her mother's suicide and pretends that her psychic gifts don't exist, and her mentor, Madame Ackermann, whom Julia sees as both a mother substitute and a pseudo sexual partner, is psychically attacking her because of Ackermann's jealousy of becoming obsolete because Julia is more powerful than her.

And this is the simpler part of the novel: Julia's journey through getting over mental and physical afflictions are like whoa. Just whoa. However, with that being said, I really, really enjoyed this novel. The Vanishers was different. It was kooky and bizarre but realistic and plausible. Under all the "psychic-ness" of it was a story about a young woman trying to reconcille her lost of her mother and how that lack of resolution trickled and influenced her own life, even perhaps had a hand in making her sick, and made her open to other people's manipulation.

I liked the tone of the book. It was relaxed but tense. I highly enjoyed Julavits' writing. It's not all books that I have considered within the first few pages to be well written but with The Vanishers, I did.

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This is a 3.67 star review.

I can totally understand why other reviewers did not like Heidi Julavits' The Vanishers. A yound woman named Julia Severin, love that surmame, is studying at The Workshop, which is a post graduate study for psychics.

Julia has some issues, to say the least: she is left in

Show More

an emotional void due to her mother's suicide when she was only a month old, her father is emotionally responsive and perfers to keep mum about her mother's suicide and pretends that her psychic gifts don't exist, and her mentor, Madame Ackermann, whom Julia sees as both a mother substitute and a pseudo sexual partner, is psychically attacking her because of Ackermann's jealousy of becoming obsolete because Julia is more powerful than her.

And this is the simpler part of the novel: Julia's journey through getting over mental and physical afflictions are like whoa. Just whoa. However, with that being said, I really, really enjoyed this novel. The Vanishers was different. It was kooky and bizarre but realistic and plausible. Under all the "psychic-ness" of it was a story about a young woman trying to reconcille her lost of her mother and how that lack of resolution trickled and influenced her own life, even perhaps had a hand in making her sick, and made her open to other people's manipulation.

I liked the tone of the book. It was relaxed but tense. I highly enjoyed Julavits' writing. It's not all books that I have considered within the first few pages to be well written but with The Vanishers, I did.

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This was recommended to me, and I didn't like it at all in the beginning but kept reading it to see why it was recommended. It did get better as it went along, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone. It's about a woman with psychic abilities who goes to a school to develop these abilities,

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and how she is psychically attacked and develops an illness for a year. She then gets involved with some people who supposedly want to help her but are actually using her. Her mother committed suicide when she was only a month old and this resurfaces throughout the book. It's a very strange concept overall, and kind of convoluted and hard to figure out.

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Julia is a student at a special institute for psychics. She is under the tutelage of Madame Ackerman, a renowned psychic at the institute who begins to suspect that Julia's powers are underestimated and proceeds to take advantage of her, as well as pressing for details of Julia's mother's death by

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suicide when Julia was just an infant. Soon after, Julia suffers a "psychic attack" and becomes physically and emotionally ill. As she struggles to make sense of things, new people begin entering her life and odd things begin to surface.

I really had no idea what I was getting into when I started reading this one. My plot summary sounds confusing, but that's because this novel is just that: confusing. My head was spinning a large portion of the time, trying to make sense of what I was reading. It's an odd story with a very surreal element. And yet. Normally I would blow this off as too weird and just move along, but it was intriguing enough to keep me reading. The story was kind of wacko, but the writing was good. This is one of those novels that will either appeal to you or it won't, even though I sort of fell somewhere in the middle.

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The Vanishers is a fantastic novel, using absurdist humor to explore grief and illness. Julavits has some interesting things to say about illness, our perception of illness, and our perception of our own emotional lives. The tempo of the thriller / mystery novel allows you to get pretty deep into

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the protagonist's mind, laughing at her hapless adventures (As this unusual customer beelined for my desk, however, she caught her toe on the corner of the jute rug and departed the floor, kraft tray outstretched and then released so that it collided with my chest as I'd been uttering in Arabic to no one, "I'll transfer you to the sales department." p. 50) and then suddenly you realize that you're having a great many insights into the nature of emotion. I particularly liked the description of anger as women often conceive of it — something ugly, feral, something that must be defended against, something that originates from the hate and jealously of other people.

There was some material about performance art and mid-century modern furniture; if I happened to share those particular interests, this probably would have been one of my favorite novels of all time. Sadly, I know nothing about either. So we'll call it 4/5 stars for fantastic writing, unerring humor, an intelligent message about the human condition, and if you know what a Barcelona chair is, boy are you in for a treat.

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3.5 Difficult to rate. A wondrous, compelling plot and engaging tone are a little at odds with inconsistently polished prose and a bit too much explanation. A good book that might have been great in a draft or two. A more experimental form could have better matched the content. Worth it for the

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descriptions of furniture.

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The summary blurb of this book gives you the skeleton of the story. But it doesn't give credit for the writer's terrific imagination and humor. The story keeps you guessing - along with the protagonist, Julia - at what is going on! It does get complicated, and sometimes confusing, but it's a

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satisfying, if quirky read.

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