Alice Hoffman: The Museum of Extraordinary Things

 Hi everyone

I finished reading Alice Hoffman's The Museum of Extraordinary Things. It was my first book by Alice Hoffman and I'm not sure I'll try anything else.
The book has a gorgeous cover and that totally sucked me in. I read it on my e-reader.

"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."

This was a 'meh' book. It didn't stay with me. I could care less for the story and the characters. 
The characters were very one-dimensional and dull. And ugly! So many ugly things happen in this book. The lovestory didn't add anything interesting to the story, the romantic connection they had was weak or really non-existent. I couldn't detect anything strong or rebellious in the two maincharacters even though they talk about it a lot.
Hoffman's writing was uninspired, repetitive. A boring, tragic, ugly story in which she tried to show how much she knows of New York's history just because she can, not because it fits the story.

Sad that this beautiful cover holds such a mediocre story.

Happy reading.
Helena