New York, 1911. Coralie Sardie works for her father, the "professor" and impresario of the Museum of Extraordinary Things, a freak show in Coney Island. She performs as a mermaid in a tank but really lives for her long swims in the cold Hudson River. While Coralie's element is water, Eddie Cohen is tormented by fire. He fled a fiery pogrom in his native Russia and now wants to break away from his miserable life on the Lower East Side and become a photographer. Eddie's hatred of rich factory owners increases when he takes photos of the ghastly fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Greenwich Village. Meanwhile, Professor Sardie grows even more sinister as the crowds desert his "museum" for the new and lavish amusement palaces of Luna Park and Dreamland. Then Coralie and Eddie get caught up in the chaos as Dreamland burns to the ground. VERDICT With a sprinkling of magical realism, Hoffman (Survival Lessons) blends social realism, historical fiction, romance, and mystery in a fast-paced and dramatic novel filled with colorful characters and vivid scenes of life in New York more than a century ago. [See Prepub Alert, 8/13/13.]-Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* After her imaginative foray into ancient Judaic history in The Dovekeepers (2011), Hoffman breathes fiery life into an enrapturing fairy tale and historical fiction mash-up. Professor Sardie, a fanatic with a secret past and a Dr. Frankenstein aura, runs the Museum of Extraordinary Things on Coney Island in 1911, showcasing living wonders, including his motherless daughter, web-fingered Coralie, who performs in a tank as the Mermaid. Ezekiel Cohen, a motherless Orthodox Jewish immigrant from Russia, abandons his tailor father and his faith, calls himself Eddie, and devotes himself to photography. As Coralie's father puts her at grave risk to perpetuate what he hopes will be a profitable hoax, Eddie documents the shocking and tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and tries to solve the mystery of a young woman's disappearance. Both Coralie and Eddie end up experiencing unnerving epiphanies in the glorious and imperiled wilderness on the northern coast of Manhattan. With a Jewish mystic and a distinguished Wolfman, ravishing evocations of the rapidly transforming city and the tawdry yet profoundly human magnetism of Coney Island, dramatic perspectives on criminal greed and the coalescence of the labor movement, and keen appreciation for the new clarity photography fostered, Hoffman unveils both horror and magic in this transfixing tale of liberation and love in a metropolis of lies, yearning, and metamorphosis. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Extensive promotion and an author tour will amplify the appeal of one of best-selling Hoffman's most incandescent novels.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

ALICE HOFFMAN has always celebrated the marvelousness of what's real in the world, even as she creates the distinctive atmosphere of uncanniness and magical potential that looms over her fiction. Her devoted readers expect melodramatic stories imbued with the atmosphere of folk tales. Omens and portents are her stock in trade. Feminist themes and generous amounts of Renaissance Faire-style potted history make her storytelling all the more suggestive. Eerie and powerful acts of nature signify undercurrents of mood the way irregular minor chords in the background music tell us how to feel during ominous scenes at the movies. Lost in a dark forest of one kind or another, Hoffman's characters have a heightened awareness of the hidden meanings that surround them as they struggle toward the light. "The Museum of Extraordinary Things" will not disappoint readers longing to be swept up by a lavish tale about strange yet sympathetic people, haunted by the past and living in bizarre circumstances. But those who have admired Hoffman's best and most gracefully literary novels ("At Risk," "Seventh Heaven," "Turtle Moon," "Second Nature," "Practical Magic," "The River King") will be less enchanted, unable to ignore the hackneyed and thinly sketched writing that diminishes many scenes in these pages. The museum of the novel's title is a Coney Island boardwalk attraction presided over by Professor Sardie, part mad scientist and part shrewd magician. Adjacent to Luna Park, the Steeplechase and the soon-to-open Dreamland, this showcase of "living wonders" has at various times over the years included the Wolfman, the Butterfly Girl, the Goat Boy, the Bird Woman, the Bee Woman and the Siamese Twins, along with a menagerie of frogs, vipers, lizards, hummingbirds, a 100-year-old tortoise - and Sardie's daughter, Coralie, who has, from the age of 10, spent hours suspended in a tank of water playing the Human Mermaid for paying customers. (As she grows older, her sinister father compels her to perform lewd after-hours displays for a select audience of patrons willing to pay a premium.) Coralie, who narrates parts of the story in an elegiac tone, has a freakish affinity for water. Her father has trained her from girlhood to swim extraordinary distances, even in the icy November Atlantic, most often at night. Before she reaches adolescence, she can swim five miles from Coney Island, and she's at home in the tidal currents of the Hudson River. Her conditioning regimen is extreme: "My father believed that we took on the attributes of our diet, and he made certain I ate a meal of fish every day so my constitution might echo the abilities of these creatures. We bathed in ice water. ... My father had a breathing tube constructed so that I could remain soaking underwater in the clawfoot tub, and soon my baths lasted an hour or more. I had only to take a puff of air in order to remain beneath the surface. I felt comfortable in this element, a sort of girlfish, and soon I didn't feel the cold as others did, becoming more and more accustomed to temperatures that would chill others to the bone." Coralie has a secret shame. "My father insisted I wear white cotton gloves in the summer and a creamy kid leather pair when the chill set in." Her bare hands are displayed only when she is the Human Mermaid, and then they're dyed blue to match her silk-covered bamboo tail. She was born with webbed fingers. Coralie seems to accept her oddness, and she's even seen hopefully searching her own throat for signs of gills, although Hoffman tells us "she despised herself because of this single flaw." Once she tried to cut through the webbing, but, as Hoffman explains, fairy-tale style, "Beads of blood began to fall onto her lap after she nicked the first bit of skin. Each drop was so brightly crimson, she had startled and quickly dropped the knife." Accompanying her father on his rounds of whorehouses and morgues in his ceaseless search for living freaks, and for the human and animal body parts he can fashion into grotesque exhibits for his museum, Coralie often carries "the same knife she had used to draw blood when she cut through the webbing on her hands" - only now it's to protect herself from men who might pay her unwelcome attention. Professor Sardie's plan for his museum's renewal is set in motion at the start of 1911, when there are repeated sightings of a sea monster in the Hudson, a silvery, scaled creature, "a being that was dark and unfathomable, almost human in its countenance, with fleet, watery movements." This apparition is, of course, the now-18-year-old Coralie, who swims through the night, "keeping pace alongside the striped bass that spawned upriver, certain of herself even in uncertain tides." The newspapers are filled with stories about the so-called Hudson Mystery. "All she had done was show a glimpse of what might be possible, a waterlogged and furtive river-fiend that had drifted out of nightmares and into the waterways of the city of New York." If the Museum of Extraordinary Things can display the captured Hudson Mystery, the crowds that have been lost to newer, gaudier entertainments will return and the professor's faltering business will survive. As Coralie emerges from the river one evening, she catches a glimpse of a reclusive photographer named Ezekiel Cohen, who likes to take nocturnal walks with his dog in the woods of northern Manhattan. An Orthodox Jewish immigrant who has abandoned his faith and his community, he has changed his name to Eddie. He's a boy of the streets straight out of a Horatio Alger story, and he's also a witness to the horror of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire. The photographs he takes on that terrible day lead him to a mission - solving the mystery of a young woman's disappearance. Hoffman's depiction of the Triangle fire only vaguely conveys the pathos and urgency of that historic disaster, which took the lives of 146 garment workers in a matter of minutes. Her treatment, later in the novel, of the Dreamland conflagration, which occurred almost exactly two months later, is more authentic and vivid, perhaps because it's less familiar, allowing Hoffman to be more imaginative as she incorporates it into her plot. ONCE CORALIE AND Eddie discover each other, their profound, mystical attraction and mutual obsession become forces of their own, driving the story forward. Despite the novel's heavy-handed passages about the rights of children, women and workers, and despite its lapses in historic tone and ambience (Eddie's habit, for example, of saying things like "no problem"), a big, entertaining tale emerges. "The Museum of Extraordinary Things" is, in a way, a museum of Alice Hoffman's bag of plot tricks: girls with unusual talents, love at first sight, mysterious parents, addiction and alcoholism, orphans raised by unsuitable people. Does it rank with the best of her work? In the words of Professor Sardie: "Our creature will be whatever people imagine it to be. For what men believe in, they will pay to see." KATHARINE WEBER, the author of five novels and a memoir, is the Richard L. Thomas Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College.

A young woman grows up in her father's eponymous Coney Island museum at the turn of the 20th century in Hoffman's (The Dovekeepers, 2011, etc.) novel. Watched over by her beloved but acid-scarred family housekeeper, motherless Coralie lives a seemingly idyllic early childhood with her intellectual father above the "museum" he runs but doesn't let her visit. Then, on Coralie's 10th birthday, in 1903, her father not only escorts her through the exhibit for the first time, but he also puts her on display as "The Human Mermaid." Born with webbed fingers, Coralie, an expert swimmer, spends her days in a tank wearing her mermaid suit. At first, she loves the work, in what her father staunchly denies is a freak show, and becomes close to other members of the exhibition, particularly the "Wolfman," with whom Coralie's housekeeper falls in love. But as business flags, her father arranges special showings, during which adolescent Coralie must swim naked for invited male audiences. By 1911, her father, a Fagin-like villain who hopes to milk rumored sightings of a sea monster, sends Coralie into New York's waters at odd hours disguised as the monster. On one of her nightly swims, Coralie comes ashore, discovers a young man with a camera at a campfire and is instantly smitten. Eddie Cohen, the son of an Orthodox Jew, has left behind his ethnic and spiritual roots to become a photographer. Motherless like Coralie, Eddie has also been employed in phony magic, in his case, finding missing persons for a fake seer. Their love affair and Coralie's rebellion against her father play out in a changing New York City as seen through Eddie's photographic lens. Hoffman displays an obvious affection for the city, as well as for those society would deem freaks, but readers looking for an evocative, magical take on the immigrant experience would be better served by Helene Wecker's The Golem and Jinni (2013).]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Like the museum of its title, Hoffman's (The Dovekeepers) latest novel is a collection of curiosities, each fascinating in its own right, but haphazardly connected as a whole. New York City in 1911 is caught between its future and its past: the last woods are threatened by sidewalks; sweatshops and child labor abuses give rise to a cruel division between rich and poor. Coralie Sardie's father runs Coney Island's Museum of Extraordinary Things, a sideshow exhibit of pickled and preserved wonders, as well as living freaks; Coralie's own webbed hands lead her father to train her as a swimmer, billing her as "the Human Mermaid." But Professor Sardie's museum is threatened by the city's changing tastes, and he becomes increasingly sinister in his control of Coralie and his plans for the museum's future. In a parallel, hopscotching storyline, Eddie Cohen, a Russian Orthodox Jewish immigrant, abandons his father and his community and becomes a photographer, finding his purpose in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the search for one of its victims. Though both stories have Hoffman's trademark magical realism and hold great potential, their connection is tenuous-literally and thematically-and their complexities leave them incompletely explored. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.