The Museum of Extraordinary Things, a review

From the back of the book:

"...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-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. The Museum of Extraordinary Things is Alice Hoffman at her most spellbinding."

Oh Alice Hoffman. If you don't know the name, you will have almost certainly heard of at least one title by her, Practical Magic. While I haven't read Practical Magic (I don't enjoy witch stories very much), I have read several other titles by Alice Hoffman. Every one of them grabbed me by the collar and drug me into the world of the story. If that's something you like in a book, I have a good one for you.

I think Hoffman's mastery is in the way in which she gives you characters without you really noticing that you've noticed them. They slip in sideways, easing their way onto their memory. You often don't realize how much you care about them until something happens to them. By then, you think of the character like a real person. You want things for their future, good or ill, and you miss them when they are gone.

Even side characters are given a sense of dignity and space. Here is an example of a character who is mentioned here, and never again:

"He was an old man from Russia, who owned a single suit that he wore every day. There was sorrow in the seams of his clothes, but he was used to death. It seemed that life was a bolt of cloth to him, and he was there to fold it and set it in a drawer. He said the prayers over the open grave, then, after being paid, quickly went on to his next appointment."

Another example of this is Eddie Cohen's father. Eddie is born Ezekial Cohen, an Orthodox Jew from Russia. He and his father immigrate to New York after losing Eddie's mother in a terrible fire. Eddie is dissatisfied with his father, believing the man to be a coward. Throughout the book, I longed for father and son to be reunited. At the end, the reader gets to learn that they are eventually reunited. It happens off page. I was okay with that, because it felt like it would have been such an emotional reunion, I felt the characters deserved the privacy of that moment. Watching it would have felt voyeuristic. Just knowing they eventually are reunited was enough.

So, fictional characters so real that they deserve their own privacy and dignity. Have you encountered this before in writing? For me, it's extremely rare.

Secondly, Alice Hoffman writes beautiful, descriptive prose. She obviously does her footwork to really know her history once she picks a setting. When reading, you feel as if you have slipped under the skin of a place. You are inside, swimming in its living veins, peering out from the inside. It's a kind of time travel to read. In The Museum of Extraordinary Things, we are injected into the lifeblood of New York City, circa 1911. It is a tumultuous year that changed that city twice over. The story is bookended by two fires, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, and Coney Island. The prose is vivid enough that you will check your clothes for burning embers after you read both fires.

But what is it about? The main characters are Coralie Sardie and Eddie Cohen. Eddie's story revolves around his gift of finding lost things. As a child, he finds the path out of the forest for his father, after the fire that kills his mother. As a youth, he finds missing men for a local "wizard" amongst the Jewish community in New York City. He leaves that life to become a photographer. Photography consumes all of his attention and transforms him from a Jewish boy named Ezekial into Eddie, a photographer of crime scenes and criminals for newspapers. After years of shunning his heritage and his people, a Jewish man convinces him to go back to finding people again. The man's daughter went missing after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, but her father is convinced she did not die in it. Eddie reluctantly takes up the job of finding a missing person again, and that path leads him into many dark corners of the city, and eventually into Coralie.

Coralie is, arguably, a lost thing herself. She is the daughter of a magician who runs The Museum of Extraordinary Things. The Museum is struggling to compete with exciting new amusement park, Dreamland, across the street. His museum is full of natural wonders, including people with deformities or strange talents. In an effort to win back the crowd, he manufactures a new wonder, The Hudson Mystery. A creature seen swimming in the Hudson River. The creature is Coralie. She was born with webbed fingers, and he has been training her from a young age to endure cold, hold her breath, and swim great lengths. Now, she swims the Hudson River in the dark, to create the rumors of the Hudson Mystery.

Coralie becomes a wonder in the museum herself, The Mermaid. But it isn't enough. Her portion of the story tells of the decline of The Museum, her father's increasingly desperate measures to keep it going, and gives us a glimpse into the lives of these "freaks."

Eventually, Coralie and Eddie's stories collide over the missing dead girl.

Along the way, you will get attached to a "wolfman" with hair all over his body, including his face, Maureen, a tragic beauty with burns all over her face and body, an ex-gangster who prefers birds over people, a heiress who defies her family to fight for women's rights, and a hermit living in the last wilderness on the island. There are others, like the wizard Hochman, Malia the Butterfly Girl, and many more. There is a hundred-year-old turtle, a wolf, a tiny elephant so dedicated to his master that he sleeps in his room, and too many more to list here. At the end, when the final fire sweeps across the page, you feel as if you could be called upon to identify the remains of The Museum. You feel as though your fingers would recognize the wood of the building and your feet would recognize the pathway under the pear tree in the backyard.

If you like historical fiction, and even if you don't, I recommend this book. It is immersive in a way that few authors accomplish. I honestly think that any avid reader would like this book.

However, I do not recommend this book for minors. Coralie survives some despicable things, and those things might be too much for a younger reader to get through. Most adults will be fine, though I need to be clear: there is a sexual molestation scene. While the act isn't completed, it's a near thing. That might be too triggering for some readers, so be warned!

Overall, I loved this book. Alice Hoffman is one of those authors that I strive to be like in many ways. I usually find her books shelved with "general fiction," but I think she would be best described as writing "magical realism." Every wonder is explained eventually, but at the end of the story, you believe in magic more instead of less.

As always, my copy is for sale on my website, which you can find here. Let me know, is this one you'll be reading next?