Happy Release Day!
Congrats Katy
on the release today of
The Magician's Daughter!
The Magician's Daughter: A Memoir by Katy Grabel
Memoir, Nonfiction, Thriller, 244 pages
Published May 13, 2025 by Wild Rising Press
Never before has the daughter of a great magician written with such candor and beauty about magic's backstage—and onstage—world, where even the most outlandish dreams are possible.
The Magician's Daughter—A Memoir is a coming-of-age story set within the motion and light of a traveling magic show. Fourteen-year-old Katy is the daughter of Lee Grabel, a former professional magician stuck behind a desk in the suburbs who yearns to rekindle the past fame of his old magic show. When he decides to hit the road again in a grand bid to be a Las Vegas headliner, Katy has her chance for the spotlight she yearns for as his stage assistant. With a truck full of wonderments, the Grabel family and their crew go on tour across the western states, where trouble quickly ensues along with the increasing unhappiness of her mother —The Beautiful Helene—who is disenchanted with the magic show even as she runs it with military precision from her table stage right. Setting up, performing, and packing out of town after town, tensions mount, and betrayal is in the air.
Through error and misstep, Katy struggles to free herself from the show's intoxicating spotlight. Meanwhile, the Grabels and their crew are getting closer to their booking at the Las Vegas Convention Center, where the show's ultimate fate will be determined.
Readers will be captivated by this page-turner where Penn & Teller meets Mission Impossible. It's a tale that delves into the complexities of family dynamics and the enduring power of love, set against the backdrop of a mesmerizing magic show.
My thoughts about The Magician's Daughter ~~
(I love to note the first lines of the books I'm reading. First lines can really grab a reader's attention and I love seeing where the author takes the reader after their first lines.)
First line—"I loved the way the words 'Las Vegas' felt in my body, like a gush of hot, throaty wind."
I grew up at about the same time that this author did and I remember the thrill of the circuses and magicians when they came to town. The Magician's Daughter gives us a behind the scenes look at what life was like in a traveling show.
I can't even imagine what it would be like to be a teenager living the life that Katy did, with her parents and the rest of the crew, on the road for so many months straight. This story was definitely an eye-opening read.
The Magician's Daughter is a well written memoir giving the reader insight to a life we will never live.
I received an ARC of The Magician's Daughter and this is my honest opinion of the book.
About the author
My parents’ career in professional magic has always inspired my writing. My short story about a sad traveling showman won first place in New Millennium Writings, and a piece about magicians’ assistants was published in ZYZZYVA. But my writing about my father the magician began way before then. When I was a kid, I got little notebook, and the first thing I wrote in it was one of his jokes. And when I traveled in his big illusion show as an assistant, I filled two 200-page notebooks with my musings and insights about the stage.
I began writing The Magician’s Daughter: A Memoir many years ago, but I had to shelf it because my father would have just hated the book. It was about the lure of the spotlight, but also the backstage, and inevitably, I revealed many of his tricks and illusions. As much as I didn’t want to quit the project, he’d been generous to me in many ways, and I just couldn’t publish it. Not till years later, when he was quite old, did I resume writing the book. News that he was blind assured me he’d never read it!
As a daughter of a magician, I’ve always asked myself: what is real magic? And I’ve looked for it everywhere. In Jungian psychology and quantum physics; runes, tarot cards and the ajna chakra. I looked for it in astrology and crystals, in the teachings of Rosicrucianism and Kabbalah; in earth religions and saints and all goddesses everywhere. I’ve found it here and there, and never where I thought it would be.
I share my time between an old rambling adobe house in Taos, New Mexico with my guitar, fancy dreams and penchant for dancing in my kitchen, and a lovely book-filled casita in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. ~ Goodreads
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