I thought Maureen was her biological mother and that it wasn’t just an emotional parentage, but some disagreed. The biggest mystery surrounding Cora was her mother. She always thought of herself as a monster yet the characterization of the human oddities made them seem less monsterish than the humans around them. There’s not much to say about our other main character, Cora. Seeing such a tragedy spurred him to change. He had been disconnected and desensitized by what he saw growing up in the Ukraine and he had let it affect him for a long time. Some felt that the fire was the impotence for Eddie trying to reconnect with other things in his life and was the beginning of his character development. Eddie was a character with a lot of distance around him as evidenced in his distance from his father. It was pointed out to me that Eddie was a photojournalist, someone who sees things through a lens and has to have some level of removal to photograph the things he saw. One of the things I said bothered me was that the Triangle Shirtwaist fire seemed really removed. Many were also reminded of the Dhaka Fire, a garment factory that caught fire in Bangladesh in 2012 though casualties, in this case, were caused more by improper exits than any locked doors ( source). This meeting was in mid-September and many people had finished the book around 9/11 so the images of people jumping out of a building to their deaths were horrific, especially close to such a date. One of the owners was caught locking doors at a factory again and was fined $20 ( source). The insurance payout they got was more than the cost of damages by about $400 per casualty. A civil case was filed and the men were fined about $75 per casualty. The owners of the factory were acquitted of manslaughter in the criminal case. Our facilitator looked up a lot of history on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Hoffman is from New York and that helps explain her ideas to set a book in such a volatile year, one that many of us had never heard of in American history. The setting was really vivid in the book.

A quick straw poll gave us six out of fourteen that enjoyed the book. I find these usually make the best book club discussions and I did feel we had a good one that night. I wasn’t a big fan of the book and I dragged my feet to get through it. A few weeks ago, my book club met to discuss Alice Hoffman’s The Museum of Extraordinary Things.

Book the museum of extraordinary things