Sonderbooks Book Review of Kaleidoscope

****Kaleidoscope*

by Dorothy Gilman

Reviewed January 31, 2002.
Ballantine Books, 2002. 244 pages.
Available at Sembach Library (F GIL).

A new Dorothy Gilman book! What a treat!

This book is much lighter than Caravan, and didn’t leave me thinking about it for long afterwards, but it was still a delight.

Kaleidoscope is a sequel to her much earlier work, The Clairvoyant Countess, although you don’t need to have read the first book to follow this one.

Madame Karitska is the clairvoyant countess. She uses psychometry--by holding an object that a person has loved, she can tell about that person. She has won the respect of a police detective, who uses her abilities to help him solve crimes.

This book, like the earlier one, tells of many of Madame Karitska’s cases. Some of them tie together, but others do not.

This is light reading, and a lot of fun. Madame Karitska is a delightful character, with true compassion for the people she encounters. Of course, if the idea of psychic powers bothers you, even in fiction, then you should probably avoid this, and most of Dorothy Gilman’s other non-Pollifax works. If you can suspend your disbelief, and wonder what it would be like for a person who was truly clairvoyant, you’ll find this book an enjoyable flight of imagination.

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Book Reviews by Sondra Eklund

***Kaleidoscope

by Dorothy Gilman

****Kaleidoscope*