The Secret Science of Magic
by Melissa Keil (Author)
Booktalk: Meet Sophia: former child prodigy and 17-year-old math mastermind. She’s been having panic attacks since she learned that after high school, former prodigies either cure cancer or go crazy. It’s a lot of pressure. So Sophia doesn’t have the patience for games right now. She especially doesn’t have the patience to figure out why all these mysterious playing cards keep turning up inside her textbooks.
Meet Joshua: highly intelligent, cheerfully unambitious, and an amateur magician. He’s Sophia’s classmate, and he’s admired her for as long as he can remember. He thinks the time is perfect to tell Sophia how he feels. He doesn’t know how wrong he is . . .
Snippet: The greatest card trick in history is known by many names. Sometimes it’s called Topping the Deck; sometimes, The Ambitious Card. But most magicians know it as The Trick that Fooled Houdini.
See, the self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Magician was so convinced of his own awesomeness that he issued an open challenge to his fellow magicians: show him any trick, three times in a row, and he’d tell you how it was done. Houdini really believed there was nothing in the world he couldn’t explain, no illusion he couldn’t deduce.
It’s possible that Houdini was a bit of a git. And he was clearly unfamiliar with the concept of a giant, karmic arsekicking.
Dai Vernon, one of the best cardsmen of all time, took up the challenge. He asked Houdini to pick a card from a deck and to write his initials on the chosen card. He slipped it into the middle of the pack. Vernon snapped his fingers and–bammo!–Houdini’s card appeared on top of the deck. Houdini made Vernon repeat the trick again. And again. Vernon repeated it seven times, but Houdini could not explain how it was done. Needless to say, the World’s Greatest Magician was pissed. Houdini may have aced jailbreaks and underwater escapes, but he never did learn Vernon’s trick.
I figured it out when I was ten.
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