The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman: book review

The Museum of Extraordinary Things (2014) is set on Coney Island, New York, from March to May 1911.

Coralie Sardie is 18 years old. Her father, Professor Sardie, is from France, and though that is what he called himself it was not in fact his real name. He is “both a scientist and a magician” and a “man of the future” for he is the owner of the Museum of Extraordinary Things.

The Museum is part original house, built in 1862, and part add-on museum. The Professor employs a dozen or so performers and rarities during the summer season to entertain the beachside tourists. He employs people such as conjoined twins, a man with a pointed head, and a boy with hooves instead of feet. He is a collector of unusual humans. If audiences lost interest in them, he would fire them and look for more “bankable” performers. He had too – he was in competition with Dreamland and Luna Park right down along the beach. He also collected bones, organs, deformed human specimens, and anything unusual. He conducts experiments and dissections too. In fact, he has a workshop cellar that has two bolts to keep people out. Not even Coralie knows what is in the cellar.

Coralie is his only daughter, raised by housekeeper Maureen Higgens, after her mother died. Her life is among extraordinary things and people. Coralie was also a “monster” for she had webbed fingers, which she covered with gloves. The Professor trains her to swim long distances and stay for long periods underwater. He is training her to become a “human mermaid.” He insists that she eats fish every day. They swim together in the evening, sometimes up to eight kilometres (five miles). But she is a shy child with no confidence, always doing as her father asks. At the age of 10, she becomes an exhibit in a large tank in the middle of the museum.

One evening, swimming alone in the Hudson River, she sees Ezekiel (Eddie) Cohen, “the man who couldn’t sleep.” He migrated to America with his father, from Ukraine, after the death of his mother. He had a “secret” nightlife as a photographer. He worked for Abraham Hochman, a mind reader and “finder of the lost.” Eddie feels compelled to solve the mystery of a lost girl – which brings him into contact with Coralie when he visits the museum.

Samuel Weiss, a tailor, and father of two daughters, Ella and Hannah, has heard of Eddie’s reputation for finding people. He wants Eddie to look for Hannah, missing after a factory fire.

This mystery novel is book-ended by two “great” fires – true historical fires on Coney Island in 1911: at the beginning it is the fire at the Triangle Shirt-Waist Company and at the end of the novel it is the fire at Dreamland. Both fires affect the lives and livelihoods of people at Coney Island.

The novel is written in the third person, but there are also sections written in the first person by Coralie Sardie and Eddie Cohen.

The main characters – Coralie, the Professor, and Eddie – and even the extraordinary people performing at the museum – are not what they seem. There are various levels of illusion and deceit – of showcasing their “deformities” for the public for pay and yet hiding them when among the public during their “ordinary life.” Shy Coralie, performing for eight years, becomes quietly defiant.

This is a mystery of opposites: summer and winter, day and night, exposed and hidden talents, illusion and reality, ordinary and extraordinary, life and death, and truth and lies. It is also a love story of two youths, both affected by the death of their mothers, and the dominance of their fathers, brought together in defiance and their search for freedom.

With interesting descriptions and dialogue by a master storyteller, and a combination of fact and fiction, it is both fascinating and fanciful. Yet often it is disjointed, swapping between narrators, and confusing the timelines, with periods of repetition. Actually I think the author could have deleted the love story and the entire character of Eddie and it would still have been an effective story focusing on Coralie and how she handles her “deformity.” Another downside is the fine print, much of it in italics (the first person narratives), in a lengthy novel of 384 pages. Nevertheless, it is worthy of a read, mainly due to its themes of exploitation, defiance, and freedom.