The Invention of Everything Else
By: Samantha Hunt

The Invention of Everything Else is billed as a story about a chambermaid, Louisa in 1943 at The Hotel New Yorker. Louisa is 19 and forms an unlikely friendship with Nikola Tesla. Tesla lived at the hotel, and indeed died there in 1943. The book’s main story line held a lot of promise. Unfortunately, the book didn’t live up to the promise that spark of an idea had.

One problem the story has is that it jumps around a lot. It is told in first person, but the person telling the story changes without notice. On top of that there are a lot of flashbacks. It’s difficult to follow, and there doesn’t seem to be any real flow to it. There are hints of time travel, and so the reader starts to wonder if this is really a science fiction book. Is the man Louisa met on the train from the future? Or a former classmate, as he says?  There are also lots of interviews between people you don’t know interspersed through out the book. More confusion. Especially if you aren’t a student of the life of Tesla.

The reader meets Tesla on the first page, but it is a good one-third of the way through the book before Louisa meets him. And the author, while seeming to respect the man as an inventor, paints him to be fairly crazy. Some of the things are a sort of folklore about Tesla, like his intense love of one particular pidgeon. She takes it a step further and has Tesla speaking to the bird as if she is his wife.  

Louisa has a vivid imagination, and sees life as if she is part of a radio drama. This causes more confusion, as you don’t know if she is imagining things or not. 

For some reason, Louisa is extremely jealous of her mother, who died while giving birth to her. She chastises her father because he desperately misses her. She never sees the beauty of that wonderfully deep love. Yes, her father becomes obsessed about reuniting with his wife, gone for 18 years at the time, and hence the time machine.

I think if the author had made a firm decision on whether this was a science fiction book or a drama, it would have gone a long ways towards making it an excellent book. The reader is always left hanging, and frankly, it was one of those books where, you want to know what happens, but you’re really happy when you are done with it.

The sad thing is, there were so many possibilities of really good ideas…. If the author had chosen to run with them, the story could have been a great adventure.

The book, like Nikola Tesla himself, showed a lot of creative and wonderful ideas, but then petered out into unrealized goals.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed