Diary of a Djinn

A Novel

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by Gini Alhadeff

Anchor Books

Due/Published March 2004, 224 pages, paper

ISBN 1400034612

New in paper (S04)

Diary of a Djinn takes the narrator and her alter ego, the playful and watchful djinn, on a series of adventures from the glamorous rigors of a Milan fashion house in the 1980s, where the narrator is a reluctant muse to the designer, to 1990s Manhattan. In a humorous flashback, she revisits the cloistered life of a Florentine boarding school filled with the daughters of bluebloods and industrialists - a time of comic/catastrophic infatuations with improbable men. In New York, she finally meets Hare - perfect, as the djinn comments, "because he was not 'free' . . . a way for her to get used to the idea that people are not possessions." She is befriended by his mother, the indomitable octogenarian Princess who wears Givenchy and Courreges, swears by Leopardi and Shakespeare, and believes that art should be left to geniuses but otherwise discouraged. In sickness and in health, as Diary of a Djinn reveals, the body is a magic bottle that can sometimes fall into the wrong hands, until the all-knowing djinn comes to the rescue.