The Museum Of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman – 368 pages
Book Blurb:
Coralie Sardie is the daughter of the sinister impresario behind The Museum of Extraordinary Things, a Coney Island boardwalk freak show that thrills the masses. An exceptional swimmer, Coralie appears as the Mermaid in her father’s “museum” alongside performers like the Wolfman, the Butterfly Girl, and a one-hundred-year-old turtle. One night Coralie stumbles upon a striking young man taking pictures of moonlit trees in the woods off the Hudson River. The dashing photographer is Eddie Cohen, a Russian immigrant who has run away from his father’s Lower East Side Orthodox community and his job as a tailor’s apprentice. When Eddie photographs the devastation on the streets of New York following the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, he becomes embroiled in the suspicious mystery behind a young woman’s disappearance and ignites the heart of Coralie. With its colorful crowds of bootleggers, heiresses, thugs, and idealists, New York itself becomes a riveting character as Hoffman weaves her trademark magic, romance, and masterful storytelling to unite Coralie and Eddie in a sizzling, tender, and moving story of young love in tumultuous times.
My Review: 4 stars
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Alice Hoffman has created, once again, a lyrical and magical story with the most interesting cast of characters. In all honesty, it took me a while to get into this book. The dueling stories were delightfully told, but I was getting impatient for the stories to collide. I just couldn’t understand how they would, but boy, when they do, it’s a wonderfully woven storyline. Hoffman shows her gift as a writer as the alternating chapters are told from the point of views of the two main characters and then there is also a traditional omniscient point of view before each chapter. I’m relatively familiar with these historically accurate New York fires from other books I’ve read, Triangle, in particular, however Hoffman takes a unique look at both of them. The minor characters are just too oddly human to not take notice of: the ‘wolf-man’ who reads Jane Eyre, the Jewish wizard who ‘finds’ people, the butterfly girl who loves an average man, the mobster that can ‘talk’ to birds and horses, the crotchety hermit who lives with a wolf and the Hudson River beast which I won’t spoil. I didn’t believe in the instantaneous love affair between the two main characters yet it’s one of those things I just went with to enjoy the flow of the book. Water and fire are ever-present themes in this book as is religion, spirituality, rebirth and forgiveness.
Quotes I Liked:
The past was what we carried with us, threaded to the future, and we decided whether to keep it close or let it go. Fate was both what we were given and what we made for ourselves.”
– “I knew that men told you truth for one of two reasons: when they wished to be rid of what they couldn’t bear to carry, or when they wished to include you in what they knew so their stories wouldn’t be lost.”
– “It’s part of our heritage. If our people weren’t stubborn we would have disappeared by way of our enemies’ hands long ago.”
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