The Hatbox Baby

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.

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 sy

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!

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.

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.