The Illusionist as written by Rosie Thomas - My review and where you can go to sign up to win books through the same place!

I'm going to let the descripton of the book tell you about it. I want to point out that Rosie Thomas the author had to have done an enormous amount of research to do this book and researched it and wrote about it well.  From the magicians tricks and illusions to what was invented during that period in the 1900's England, to the invention of recording voices and the process of which it was done, the first robotic type figures called automata, to the beginning of electricity and the first automobiles.  The book is rich in history each chapter about another figure in the book and they all interact with each other in a rather complete and rich way of writing. She builds on the characters well. It is a very large book almost five hundredd pages if you are looking for something entertaining, a story that you can sink your teeth into, rich in history and magic and the theater of the time than this book won't fail to disapoint.  The female who is the one of the main characters is not one fo those simpering beauties who only wish to do needlepoint and stay home pushing out babies and entertaing their husbands, this femail is very modern for her time, and you have to like her!  She was refreshing in her part of the story.  I would definately recommend this book to anyone who has interest in magic and illusions as the history of those goes back a long way and this was realy getting it's start during this time period.  
I'm not sure I loved the ending, but I'm not sure what I would have done different so I can't pick on that too much, I guess I wanted to see the characters, where they went beyond that time period I wasn't ready to give them up.  Read it you shouldn't be disappointed im this book, just remember this is not one that will grab you and keep you up all night reading and you can pull it off in one day...it is a longer novel!  I did win this book through BookReporter.com through their "One to Watch" contest.  If you would like to enter their contests they have a ton of them and you only need visit their site....http://bookreporter.com and sig up for the newsletters.
Here is the description as found on Good Reads:
From the bestselling author of the phenomenally successful The Kashmir Shawl

London 1870.
A terrifying place for a young, beautiful woman of limited means. But Eliza is modern before her time. Not for her the stifling if respectable conventionality of marriage, children, domestic drudgery. She longs for more. Through her work as an artist’s model, she meets the magnetic and irascible Devil – a born showman whose dream is to run his own theatre company.

Devil’s right-hand man is the improbably-named Carlo Bonomi, an ill-tempered dwarf with an enormous talent for all things magic and illusion. Carlo and Devil clash at every opportunity and it constantly falls upon Eliza to broker an uneasy peace between them. And then there is Jasper Button. Mild-mannered, and a family man at heart, it is his gift as an artist which makes him the unlikely final member of the motley crew.

Thrown together by a twist of fate, their lives are inextricably linked: the fortune of one depends on the fortune of the other. And as Eliza gets sucked into the seductive and dangerous world her strange companions inhabit, she risks not only her heart, but also her life…