'Curious Toys' Gets Itself Into Unnecessary Trouble
Elizabeth Hand's new historical thriller has a compelling main character and vivid, carefully drawn settings — but its treatment of the story's murderous villain leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.
Editor's note: This review contains major spoilers about the plot.
Elizabeth Hand's historical thriller Curious Toys is chiefly compelling for its smart, streetwise, complicated protagonist, teenage Pin — and for the careful and vivid evocation of Pin's Chicago circa 1915, with all of its sordid glories: amusement parks, silent film studios, gangsters and the brutal poverty of the Brickworks district, where the bricks that rebuilt the city after the Great Fire were mass-produced in suffocating kiln-smoke.
Pin's primary companion in solving the central mystery of the book, runs to 15 richly illustrated volumes — a sort of hallucinatory combination of L. Frank Baum and surrealist fable.
