“Dinitia Smith has taken this ‘true’ story and given its characters introspection and sad dignity.”
—CAROLYN SEE, The Washington Post
“[Smith] nails the fading ambience of a town that has lost its reason for being. And she shows poignantly why . . . women will seek and sustain the illusion of love.”
—CAROLE GOLDBERG, The Hartford Courant
“[A] quicksilver novel in which nothing, not even sexual identity, is unwavering . . . Smith has stripped away an even greater illusion: that human sexuality is straightforward and fathomable, normative and neat.”
—MAUREEN CORRIGAN, NPR Fresh Air
“The Illusionist is a terrifying story of the ways good people can follow their most generous instincts straight into tragedy. Dinitia Smith’s novel makes the bizarre plausible while it heightens the ordinary. I was caught in its web, beguiled from first page to last.”
—ROSELLEN BROWN
“A haunting, heartbreaking, utterly unforgettable novel. What an overwhelming accomplishment of the imagination!”
—LARRY KRAMER
“Impossible to put down, Dinitia Smith’s new novel shatters silences as it delves brilliantly into the lives of America’s cast-off white youth. White trash, transgender, single mothers, addicts, and petty criminals come alive and step out of stereotypes that have rendered them invisible and live on the pages of this courageous and fiercely erotic novel.”
—SAPPHIRE
“Dinitia Smith is the true illusionist. This remarkable novel challenges all of our notions about gender and love.”
—HILMA WOLITZER
“The Illusionist is an engrossing story about people’s seeing without seeing what’s in front of their eyes, loving without understanding the object of their affections and, finally, being destroyed by a force that only seems to be beside the point.”