Oddity
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The daughter of a murdered physician vows to protect the magical Oddity he left behind in an alternate nineteenth century where a failed Louisiana Purchase has locked a young Unified States into conflict with France. It’s the early 1800s, and Clover travels the impoverished borderlands of the Unified States with her father, a physician. See to the body before you, he teaches her, but Clover can’t help becoming distracted by bigger things, including the coming war between the US and France, ignited by a failed Louisiana Purchase, and the terrifying vermin, cobbled together from dead animals and spare parts, who patrol the woods. Most of all, she is consumed with interest for Oddities, ordinary objects with extraordinary abilities, such as a Teapot that makes endless amounts of tea and an Ice Hook that freezes everything it touches. Clover’s father has always disapproved of Oddities, but when he is murdered, Clover embarks on a perilous mission to protect the one secret Oddity he left behind. And as she uncovers the truth about her parents and her past, Clover emerges as a powerful agent of history. Here is an action-filled American fantasy of alternate history to rival the great British fantasies in ideas and scope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an alternate 1822, the uneasy peace between America, the French-controlled Louisiana Territory, and the fictional Sehanna Confederation (inspired, a note clarifies, by the Haudenosaunee Confed-eracy) is on the verge of collapse. The U.S. military searches for oddities, strange and powerful objects and entities, a handful of which stalemated the Louisiana War 20 years prior. Just before bandits kill teenage Clover's Russian country-doctor father in pursuit of one such item, he entrusts it to her with instructions to find a famed scholar of oddities in a distant city. Brown (Cinnamon & Gunpowder, for adults), making his children's debut, writes a weird world filled with vividly depicted characters. Ruthless bandits contest with Clover and her allies—a "living oddity" known as the "Cockerel Colonel" and resilient Nessa Applewhite Branagan, a traveling cure-all tonic saleswoman—for control of a cache of oddities that could win the war or further ignite it. Carefully constructed settings, such as such as an intoxicating marsh derived from an endlessly refilling wine cup and the oddities at the tale's center—a perpetually freezing ice hook, time-stopping matches—mix the mundane and the impossible, driving a memorable adventure studded with light historical references and Rytter's woodcut-style illustrations. Ages 10–14. Author's agent: Stephen Barr, Writers House.
