SOURCE: “The 1,001 Australian Nights,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 23, 1989, pp. 3, 7.

In the following review, Miner offers a positive assessment of Charades.

Many Americans will read this wildly imaginative novel as a contemporary version of “1,001 Nights” or as an attempt to reconcile the Angst of our post-Nazi Holocaust, pre-nuclear holocaust era by understanding scientific theories. Indeed, Janette Turner Hospital's stunning fourth novel is a resurrection of Scherherazade as well as an extrapolation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It reads even more provocatively as an Australian odyssey of self-determination.

Charades opens in a dimly lit office at MIT. Prof. Koenig looks up from his article on theoretical physics to find a young woman reading over his shoulder. The beautiful, irreverent visitor from Oz compliments his writing and introduces herself as the friend of someone he does not remember. Is he dreaming? Is Charade, he wonders, simply a metaphor for...