Riding With the Magi

A joke that Thomas Alva Edison played on reporters was to claim he was inventing a machine to talk with the dead. By turns, this charming—and disarming—novel depicts characters trying to do just that. Thomas Russell brilliantly links the historic summertime trans-America automobile tours of Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and a dying Thomas Edison with a wistful son’s recollection of a father who penned best-selling children’s novels. Trouble is that while alive, Dad typed in the attic and paid a good deal more attention to his imaginary character Ned Jumper than he did to his real son. So with Dad’s death all that’s left for his son is to imagine himself as Ned Jumper’s mysterious and sheltered brother; just as Edison, Ford and Firestone imagine a recently demised friend as still peeping from their car windows. With amazing whimsy and ingenuity, Riding With the Magi explores the challenge of failed families, lost friends, past dreams, male-female relations—and mortality.