Gypsies. The mere word sends shivers down my spine. The image of once brightly painted, now worn and peeling, old-world caravans driven by cunning horse traders and colorfully garbed fortune-tellers is one that inspires an eerie mixture of awe and trepidation. The power surrounding the very legends themselves is an incredible testament to how deeply engrained the superstitions have become within us all over the ages. Despite the legendary myths of their true magical abilities as witches and sorcerers, gypsies have cloaked themselves in an illusion lined with a vagabond patchwork of panhandling and swindling working to befuddle the world beyond their families and make outsiders extremely wary. Naive strangers never know what they might lose in their dealings with a caravan, their personal possessions or something far more valuable. However, one cannot deny the resonance of magic that surrounds gypsies, especially those of the old country. In Lisa Mannetti's debut novel The Gentling Box, she delves deep into the world of the gypsies of 19th century Hungary bringing to harsh, dark reality the brutal existence of one such caravan and the merciless supernatural power they possess.

Suffering the devastating poverty plaguing the lands of Hungary during the 1800's, Imre, a half-gypsy horse trader, along with his wife Mimi and daughter Lenore, have found their family cursed. Imre himself has fallen ill from a fatal disease cast upon him by Mimi's mother, Anyeta, a tyrannical sorceress. After Anyeta's passing, Imre and his family return to the old caravan to allow Mimi to say her goodbyes. The gypsies there are not as welcoming of Imre and Mimi's arrival, however, plagued by layers upon layers of murderous corruption and wicked illusions initiated by Anyeta before her death. When Lenore becomes deathly ill after a certain magical assault, Mimi is driven to assume her mother's power and tricked into claiming the "hand of the dead" by cutting off her own arm to create the needed talisman. But, again, it seems that nothing is as it appears and the caravan revolts against Imre and his family. As Imre becomes increasingly ill, he must return to the darkest ghosts of his past in order to save Lenore and put an end to the black reign of Anyeta's ghost once and for all.

Mannetti's depiction of 19th century Hungarian gypsies is in a word, masterful. One can feel the cold, dank air of the western Carpathians, hear the creaking of the wooden wagons on their tired wheels, smell the acrid twinge of campfire smoke in one's nose. Mannetti paints a dismal and bleak world in which the glamour and glory of a once prideful people has been reduced to a cannibalistic fear that consumes their every waking moment so that they fail even to notice the graying and fraying of the world around them. Indeed, their corrupt magical power is so great that it is rivaled only by their own superstitions and suspicions of one another. It is a sour, bitter anxiety that rises high in the back of the reader's throat as they are drawn into one terrifying scene after another. It is a poetic web of black magic Mannetti weaves as she skillfully crafts characters, which quickly evolve and are instantly identifiable and tangible. Indeed one could easily believe that she had spent time amongst the gypsies of Hungary, or perhaps was one in another lifetime, as her depictions are so believable. The Gentling Box is a brilliantly decadent opium den of mind-bending hallucinations fueled by old-world magic, each page more disturbing and haunting than the previous one. Absolutely stunning! Moving with the frantic speed of a terrified wild horse, this novel will take you on a ride you will not soon forget. If this is Lisa Mannetti's debut, I cannot wait to see what she will produce for us in the future.