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, and I couldn’t care less about the story or the characters.

The characters were very one-dimensional and dull. And ugly; so many ugly things happen in this book. The love story didn’t add anything interesting to the plot. The romantic connection between Coralie and Eddie was weak or nonexistent. I couldn’t detect anything strong or rebellious in the two main characters, even though they talk about it a lot.

Hoffman’s writing was uninspired and repetitive. This is a boring, tragic, ugly story in which she tried to show how much she knows about New York’s history and not because it fits the story, but just because she can.

It’s sad that this beautiful cover holds such a mediocre story.

Have you read The Museum of Extraordinary Things? Did you enjoy it more than I did, or did you feel the same way? I’d love to hear your thoughts! 

Happy reading.
Helena