Customer Reviews

The Hatbox Baby (Charles Paris Mysteries)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I love it when I discover an author so gifted and talented that reading his or her current book makes me salivate at the thought of going back to savor previous works! Such is the case with Carrie Brown's "The Hatbox Baby" - the title of which alone was enough to intrigue me. And I must say that the book lives up to - and, indeed, beyond - its innovative title.

The novel tells the story of a baby which is brought to Dr. Leo Hoffman's premature baby exhibit at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. The baby's frantic father has brought him to Dr. Hoffman - considered to be a world-renown specialist in what are today called "premies" - on the advice of the midwife who helped deliver the baby. "If anyone can help your baby, HE can," she tells the baby's father.

As the father first hunts frantically for the exhibit and then, once he's found it, loiters hesitantly outside the doctor's tent, Ms. Brown demonstrates her ability to build and maintain suspense while evoking the dream-like unreality of the fair atmosphere, with its carnival trappings, misshapen participants and crowds eager for titillation and entertainment.

Careful and thorough characterizations leave the reader with clear pictures of Dr. Hoffman, Caroline the Fan Dancer (whose risque exhibition/dance show is located next door to the baby exhibit) and St. Louis, the pseudo-dwarf who is both friend and adopted family to Caroline, among others. Ms. Brown knows how to elicit the reader's sympathy for and understanding of the people that populate this novel and this connection is established through her fine writing and ability to place the reader within the minds and worlds of her characters.

And, over all, looms the World's Fair - entertaining, nightmarish, ridiculous, pathetic, but always present and always clearly delineated. This backdrop, with its focus on the future and its marvels to come, still never manages to escape the fact that some things - both good and bad - are eternal and ageless.

Of course, there is The Hatbox Baby itself and the questions it and its fellow exhibits raise, including asking the reader to consider just what is "normal" anyway. This novel is a brilliant and unforgettable work, and I recommend having time at your disposal once you begin reading it because you will not want to put it down.

On a sweltering summer morning in 1933, a baby is delivered in a hatbox to Infantorium at the World's Fair & a mystery of love lost & found begins among the freaks & marvels of the Century of Progress Exposition.

Somewhere in that hot midwestern city, a young woman is giving birth, with the help of a neighboring midwife, to an infant unlikely to survive. The father, in desperation snatches up the living babe & rushes off to the World's Fair because he'd read about a doctor who could save premature babies.

It is the life of this tiny baby, born too early, that brings strangers together in a bond of desperate hope, frantic escapes & heartwarming redemption in a far-away time our grandparents might remember well.

A beautifully researched & written adventure of a special time & a particularly strange place. A fascinating read!

I really fell in love with this book. It was a cross between Geek Love and The Ciderhouse Rules (two of my favorite books). It was odd and sad and beautiful at the same time. I just liked the idea of living amoung the people at the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1933 when things that we take for granted now were just being discovered. The author did a great job of putting you right on those streets in that era with characters you start to really to care about.
Some people complained about the ending and I can kind of see their point. There is not a lot of resolution but if you read it just to go on a trip into the strange and awesome world of carnivals and the people who inhabit them you will love the ride.

The Hatbox Baby was an enjoyable read. The writing was poetical; some of the passages brilliant. The character development was great -- I think I will live with each of the characters for a long time, wondering what became of their lives.

This story is based on an actual person, a doctor who was a pioneer in the study of prematurely born infants, though the author clearly states in her afterword that his characterization and the circumstances surrounding the book's doctor are completely fictionalized. It is a story of several unlikely characters crossing paths, changing each of them in inexplicable, important ways. The frantic father who weaves his way through the throng of the Chicago World's Fair with his prematurely born son in a hat box to the great doctor. The great doctor with his important work he's dedicated his entire life to, ignoring a hunger he can't put his finger on until he meets Caro, the seductive and beautiful fan dancer, while they both kneel in the street attempting to alleviate the sufferings of a dying man. Caro's freakish nearly dwarflike cousin, St. Louis ("named after the city, not the saint!") who follows her around from show to show for lack of anything else to do, trying to ignore the void and lack of importance in his own life. Alice, the neonatal nurse extraordinaire who cries after the loss of each baby and who couldn't be seperated from her work any more than four days when her brother, her only existing relative in the world, died. And the Hatbox Baby who has a strange capacity to make others love him.

I agree with the other reviewers who said that this book is a slow mover; it is, but it draws the reader in despite that. You want to know what happens next because you care so much about each person depicted. They seem so real.

I also agree with the other reviewers who were perplexed about the ending. What in the world did it mean? What happens? And I too wonder if perhaps Ms. Brown accidently deleted the last section, or if she simply got tired of telling her story. Or does she want us to find the ending for ourselves?

Carrie Brown's evocative "The Hatbox Baby" takes readers back to a time when premature infants were little more than sideshow attractions and the people who cared for them heroically fought against their own damaged self-images. This is a novel whose manifest belief in the innate goodness of human beings never wavers but is constantly tested, first by an artificial, illusory environment and subsequently by the characters' humbling self-doubt, and eroded sense of self-worth. Through Brown's quiet but compelling narrative and her compelling depiction of the decent, conflicted characters who drive the story, "The Hatbox Baby" engages, informs and inspires.

Set in the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago, the novel captures the contradictory, artificial and transitory qualities of an exposition which extols the possibilities of the future while existing in a city crippled by the ravages of the Great Depression. Dr. Leo Hoffman, whose "infantorium" permits the paying public to gawk at premature babies whose only chance for life depends on his selfless commitment, is acutely aware of the fair's "tragic, doomed population of itinerants and freaks, its tricks of light." He is not deceived by "its furious, breakneck demonstration of scientific witness and victory." Despite its avowal of "progress," the fair never answers Hoffman's unspoken, angry query: "See? See what we have accomplished?" Though the fair's stated purpose is to extol applied science and technological possibilities, those who attend are invariably drawn to its more prosaic, seedier attractions.

Hoffman's forsaken children share the same midway as exotic fan dancer, Caroline Day. After men satisfy their erotic yearnings staring at the exquisitely-shaped Caroline, they may choose to balm their consciences by accompanying their women companions next door to stare at the silent, struggling sufferings of premature babies. This discord between perverse observation and altruistic service, between the tawdry and the truly beautiful, between illusion and reality, resonates throughout the novel.

Nowhere does the conflict between the grotesque and the transcendent rage with more fury than it does in the character of St. Louis, the misshapen semi-dwarf cousin of Caroline. Abandoned by his own mother after a premature delivery, St. Louis (named after the city and not the saint) yearns to change his essential being. "Could ugliness, the miserable state of the orphan, be cured?" Childhood hopes for miraculous transformation inevitably fail, and St. Louis' "desperation for things to be made right" transform into "something small, which he swallowed like a tooth, its barbed root settling near his heart." His salvation is his cousin Caroline, who cares for him with authentic passion, but whose protection cannot assuage his yearnings for connection, hope and love.

It is Brown's singular brilliance that permits the interplay between Dr. Hoffman, Caroline and St. Louis to attain symbolic significance. Nor is it an unintended irony that in a fair where "the invisible energy of electricity" fills the air, where things are moved by "unseen forces" and "where everything was shown and yet nothing was revealed," that the three central characters become alive to each other in ways unimaginable to them at the onset of the exposition. "The Hatbox Baby" restores our faith in people because it reminds us that the greatest triumph humans can rightly claim is not the expansion of scientific knowledge but the uninhibited exaltation of our hearts.

Most popular books are primarily start and finish; the philosophy of many authors seems to be to hook the reader on the first two pages and promise them a WOW! ending, but forget the rest.

This book really lives in the middle. I love the descriptions of the preemies, the people who care for them, and the people who are affected by them.

I really loved some characters (we get to meet lots of people in this book) and really loathed a few (particularly That Woman, who gets her spectacular comeuppance from the elephants -- you'll know exactly who and why when you get to that page!).

Both the science and the politics of the time are interesting. The reason that the doctor "exhibits" the premature babies (most of whom have been abandoned permanently by their parents) is because there is no money to care for them in hospitals; the only way to pay for the nurses, equipment, and supplies is to charge visitors for tours of the sparkling clean, perfectly ordered, beautifully tranquil facilities.

This is not exactly a historical work (although based on real history). It is not exactly a love story, a figuring-out-life story, a mystery story, or an any-other-neat-category story. It has at least some elements of all of these things, but is difficult to pigeonhole accurately.

Be prepared for a slow start -- actually, for TWO slow starts, as the story begins in two separate places, and it takes a while for the halves to meet -- and for a choose-your-own ending, since the author doesn't resolve everything neatly at the end of the book.

If you can tolerate the slow beginning, this book has an intriguing premise. At the 1933 World's Fair, a young father races through the crowds, with a premature baby in a hatbox, to Dr. Leo Hoffman. Hoffman raises money for his premature baby hospital and research by exhibiting the tiny babies in glass incubators to the public at fairs.

By nightfall, the young man is dead outside a tavern on the fair grounds, the baby is safely ensconced in an incubator with filtered oxygen, and we are introduced to the characters next door to the hospital - Caro, the stripper/dancer and her dwarf-like cousin, St. Louis, who acts as a body guard.

The characters are interesting and the story moves along after the slow start until the last dozen pages when the story takes an odd and inexplicable turn that leaves you feeling like something important flashed by without you noticing it. But Brown's writing shows great promise and her next book should be an interesting one as well.

A dwarf, a World's Fair, elephants-on-parade, incubator babies...the author creates a magical world that had me holding my breath to the last, delicious page. I'm so glad she didn't "resolve" it for me...once she set me dreaming, I wanted to keep on dreaming and believing. Of course I know what happens; it makes perfect, happy-ending sense, the only ending imaginable.

This is the story of a child who was brought in a hatbox to the World's Fair. One of the exhibits at the fair was an "infantorium" a display of premature infants. I loved all the characters in this book. A half dwarf, a stripper, the doctor, and his ugly nurse, the wet nurse Louise. The only complaint I have is the ambiguous ending. The characterizations reminded me of T.C. Boyle's work.

Carrie Brown is a fascinating writer. I enjoy her novels for the writing and the pictures she paints in words. Sometimes we all hope the story goes on............