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Curious Toys
Contributors
Formats and Prices
- On Sale
- Sep 29, 2020
- Page Count
- 400 pages
- Publisher
- Mulholland Books
- ISBN-13
- 9780316485913
Price
$19.99Price
$25.99 CADFormat
Format:
- Trade Paperback $19.99 $25.99 CAD
- ebook $11.99 $15.99 CAD
- Audiobook Download (Unabridged)
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In the sweltering summer of 1915, Pin, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a carnival fortune-teller, dresses as a boy and joins a teenage gang that roams the famous Riverview amusement park, looking for trouble.
Unbeknownst to the well-heeled city-dwellers and visitors who come to enjoy the midway, the park is also host to a ruthless killer who uses the shadows of the dark carnival attractions to conduct his crimes. When Pin sees a man enter the Hell Gate ride with a young girl, and emerge alone, she knows that something horrific has occurred.
The crime will lead her to the iconic outsider artist Henry Darger, a brilliant but seemingly mad man. Together, the two navigate the seedy underbelly of a changing city to uncover a murderer few even know to look for.
Unbeknownst to the well-heeled city-dwellers and visitors who come to enjoy the midway, the park is also host to a ruthless killer who uses the shadows of the dark carnival attractions to conduct his crimes. When Pin sees a man enter the Hell Gate ride with a young girl, and emerge alone, she knows that something horrific has occurred.
The crime will lead her to the iconic outsider artist Henry Darger, a brilliant but seemingly mad man. Together, the two navigate the seedy underbelly of a changing city to uncover a murderer few even know to look for.
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ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKSLitHub * Chicago Public Library * CrimeReads
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"Hand--whose masterly oeuvre ranges from the eerie to the horrific, post-punk to magic--delivers another brilliant mystery.... Wonderfully imaginative and richly delivered."Ivy Pochoda, New York Times Book Review
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"Curious Toys is itself like a carnival ride: alternatively dazzling and terrifying, disorienting and marvelous."Amy Stewart, The Washington Post
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"Brilliant, bustling . . . While Hand paces her mystery with classic precision, the real reward of Curious Toys lies in its richly textured panorama of Chicago during a crucial period of change, and in its vivid characters."Gary Wolfe, Chicago Tribune
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"Deliciously creepy . . . Atmospheric . . . Hand's gripping plot mines the era's vagaries with aplomb."Associated Press
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"[Pin] is a remarkable young sleuth. . . . Curious Toys is a thriller to be savored-tough, funny, strange, and revelatory."Michael Berry, Portland Press Herald
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"This book contains a rare kind of perfection: Elizabeth Hand's rough, observant magic draws into its circle great historical accuracy, a cross-dressing central protagonist, a wonderfully tender portrait of the great Outsider Artist Henry Darger, a vibrant thriller plot, reflections on gender and its place in civic order, a helpful Ben Hecht, and one of the greatest climactic drop-the-mic moments I've ever read -- and does all this while patiently setting into place the warm emotional armatures that make Curious Toys so moving."Peter Straub
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"A well-crafted and deliciously unsettling period thriller."Booklist (starred review)
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"Hand is a mage of the page.... [Curious Toys] will enchant those who like tough-girl protagonists and antiheroes, as well as fans of historical crime fiction."Library Journal (starred review)
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"Curious Toys is wonderful! I stayed up late two nights in a row, transported. It will be catnip for readers who love Chicago, circuses, cross-dressers, and early cinema."Audrey Niffenegger, bestselling author of The Time-Traveler's Wife
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"[Hand] crafts a gritty and winsome character whose sheer determination to catch a murderer makes this mystery novel whiz by."WBUR
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"This atmospheric novel will transport you to a world you've never imagined before."Real Simple
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"Richly imaginative and psychologically complex."Kirkus Reviews
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"An atmospheric crime novel... A phantasmagoric time trip tailor-made for fans of The Devil in the White City."Publishers Weekly
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"Glittering and scruffy as its carnival setting, with the deep gravity hold of a rollercoaster."Lauren Beukes, internationally acclaimed author of The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters
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"The latest novel from genre-crossing master storyteller Elizabeth Hand journeys from thriller territory straight into the heart of horror . . . A richly layered study of horror and sin and fantasy and reality, all in a peculiarly American vein. And it's scary as hell."Chicago Review of Books
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