Earthly Astonishments
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In the late nineteenth century, in a dot of a town called Westley, lives the smallest girl in the world. Josephine stands only twenty-two inches high and her parents charge gawkers a penny a piece to see her – until they realize that the headmistress of MacLaren Academy for Girls will pay even more.
At the Academy Josephine is treated like a slave and is tormented by the fine young ladies who attend, until she takes five gold dollars and runs away. She finds a new life with R. J. Walters’ Museum of Earthly Astonishments. Among the other human curiosities in the Coney Island freak show, Josephine finds the family she has never known…and dangers greater than any she’d ever dreamed.
This riveting novel of adventure and injustice, new in paperback, has received many honors, including selection as a finalist for the Canadian Library book of the Year for Children Award, and as a shortlisted title for the Hackmatack Children’s Choice Book Award and the Red Cedar Book Award.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jocelyn (The Invisible Day) ventures into historical fiction for this often vivid but incompletely realized novel set in 1884 New York City. Twelve-year-old Josephine measures only 28U" tall, but she has outsize adventures. For the past five years, she has slaved away at Miss McLaren's academy for girls, an establishment that recalls Miss Minchin's from A Little Princess for its cruelty and hypocrisy. Exploited past endurance, Josephine runs away. Immediately she meets one R.J. Walters, the owner of The Museum of Earthly Astonishments, which displays "curiosities," human and otherwise. Billed as Little Jo-Jo, the world's smallest girl, Josephine becomes a star attraction among the Coney Island amusement-seekers, and she also becomes friends with another of Mr. Walters's "astonishments," a 14-year-old albino boy. But evil Miss McLaren is not so easily left behind, and the plot becomes a tangle of melodramatic sequences in which Miss McLaren attempts at all costs to get Josephine back in her clutches. The characters are colorful but one-dimensional; Josephine, for example, seems less an individual than a contemporary heroine assigned a period setting and a midget's body, and even her extraordinary stature is not entirely reflected in her perceptions and personality. The abundance of historical details demonstrates that the author has researched her subject, yet the characters themselves do not seem lifelike. Ages 8-12.
