This improbable route marks only the first in a lifetime of timely escapes. Joe Kavalier, a former Prague art student, arrives in Brooklyn by way of Siberia, Japan and San Francisco. Sammy is a gifted inventor of characters and situations who dreams ""the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape."" His contribution to the superhero's alter ego, Tom Mayflower, is his own stick legs, a legacy of childhood polio. Chabon's prodigious gifts for language, humor and wonderment come to full maturity in this fictional history of the legendary partnership between Sammy Klayman and Josef Kavalier, cousins and creators of the prewar masked comic book hero, the Escapist. This epic novel about the glory years of the American comic book (1939-1954) fulfills all the promise of Chabon's two earlier novels (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh Wonder Boys) and two collections of short stories (A Model World Werewolves in Their Youth), and nearly equals them all together in number of pages.
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