Book-It 'o14! Book #33
The Fifty Books Challenge, year five! ( 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013) This was a library request.
Title: The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman
Details: Copyright 2014, Simon and Schuster Inc.
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap):
"Mesmerizing and illuminating, Alice Hoffman’s The Museum of Extraordinary Things is the story of an electric and impassioned love between two vastly different souls in New York during the volatile first decades of the twentieth century.
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. The Museum of Extraordinary Things is Alice Hoffman at her most spellbinding."
Why I Wanted to Read It: In my continuing hunt for Pagan fiction, I remembered a book that is not Pagan fiction but is sort-of Witch-y fiction, Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic which was a lovely book made into a (if memory serves) truly inane movie (which tainted the book a little for me). Rereading the book again, it has many relating-to-my-kind-of-Witchcraft type elements (seeing auras, psychicism, Tarot cards) so I thought I'd given Alice Hoffman's other books a try. This one had a premise that intrigued me.
How I Liked It: While the pace is a bit slow-going, Hoffman paints a vivid setting of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century (I tend to roll my eyes when people say places become characters in books, but that's quite true here) with two very different lives that find one another.
Maybe it's my studying of fairytales and folklore (and how Disney butchered/enhanced them) over the past few months, but the book has a fairytale element without falling into cliche. The character find true love (and each other), but rather than leaving that as the somehow saving grace of the story, both undergo their own coming-of-age/search-for-self revelation independent of the love plot-line.
Strong themes of captivity, artifice, and transformation run deep through the novel and there are again easy cliches and vignettes to which the author could've fallen prey but did not. Her characters feel like folklore heroes (and villains), but with distinctly human qualities.
The pacing is probably the weakest point of the book, as it tends to trip up what should be a far more suspenseful story, but the book is overall so strong, it's worth the wait.
Title: The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman
Details: Copyright 2014, Simon and Schuster Inc.
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap):
"Mesmerizing and illuminating, Alice Hoffman’s The Museum of Extraordinary Things is the story of an electric and impassioned love between two vastly different souls in New York during the volatile first decades of the twentieth century.
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. The Museum of Extraordinary Things is Alice Hoffman at her most spellbinding."
Why I Wanted to Read It: In my continuing hunt for Pagan fiction, I remembered a book that is not Pagan fiction but is sort-of Witch-y fiction, Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic which was a lovely book made into a (if memory serves) truly inane movie (which tainted the book a little for me). Rereading the book again, it has many relating-to-my-kind-of-Witchcraft type elements (seeing auras, psychicism, Tarot cards) so I thought I'd given Alice Hoffman's other books a try. This one had a premise that intrigued me.
How I Liked It: While the pace is a bit slow-going, Hoffman paints a vivid setting of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century (I tend to roll my eyes when people say places become characters in books, but that's quite true here) with two very different lives that find one another.
Maybe it's my studying of fairytales and folklore (and how Disney butchered/enhanced them) over the past few months, but the book has a fairytale element without falling into cliche. The character find true love (and each other), but rather than leaving that as the somehow saving grace of the story, both undergo their own coming-of-age/search-for-self revelation independent of the love plot-line.
Strong themes of captivity, artifice, and transformation run deep through the novel and there are again easy cliches and vignettes to which the author could've fallen prey but did not. Her characters feel like folklore heroes (and villains), but with distinctly human qualities.
The pacing is probably the weakest point of the book, as it tends to trip up what should be a far more suspenseful story, but the book is overall so strong, it's worth the wait.