Little

Title:

Little

Author:

Carey, Edward, 1970- author, illustrator.

Personal Author:

Carey, Edward, 1970- author, illustrator.

ISBN:

9780525534327

Physical Description:

436 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Abstract:

"The wry, macabre, unforgettable tale of an ambitious orphan in Revolutionary Paris, befriended by royalty and radicals, who transforms herself into the legendary Madame Tussaud" -- Provided by publisher.

In 1761 a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess and saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling. The revolutionary mob is demanding heads-- and at the wax museum, heads are what they do. -- adapted from jacket

Personal Subject:

Tussaud, Marie, 1761-1850-Fiction.

Subject Term:

Orphans -- Fiction.

Wax modellers -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Fiction.

Genre:

Biographical fiction.

Historical fiction.

Summary:

"The wry, macabre, unforgettable tale of an ambitious orphan in Revolutionary Paris, befriended by royalty and radicals, who transforms herself into the legendary Madame Tussaud" --

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Belmont	Book	FICTION CAREY	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Hull Street	Book	FICTION CAREY	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Main Library	Book	FICTION CAREY	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Westover Hills	Book	FICTION CAREY	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

"An amazing achievement. . . A compulsively readable novel, so canny and weird and surfeited with the reality of human capacity and ingenuity that I am stymied for comparison. Dickens and David Lynch? Defoe meets Margaret Atwood? Judge for yourself." --Gregory Maguire, New York Times- bestselling author of Wicked

The wry, macabre, unforgettable tale of an ambitious orphan in Revolutionary Paris, befriended by royalty and radicals, who transforms herself into the legendary Madame Tussaud.

In 1761, a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess and saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling: The revolutionary mob is demanding heads, and . . . at the wax museum, heads are what they do.

In the tradition of Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus , Edward Carey's Little is a darkly endearing cavalcade of a novel--a story of art, class, determination, and how we hold on to what we love.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

This historical novel explores Revolutionary Paris through the fictionalized eyes of the orphan who grew up to become Madame Tussaud.Born in a little Alsatian village in 1761, Anne Marie Grosholtzcalled Marieinherits her mother's large Roman nose, her father's large, upturned chin, and little else. Marie's widowed mother dies soon after taking a job as housekeeper to Doctor Curtius, a physician who makes wax models of organs and body parts. Little Marie moves to Paris with Curtius, where he opens a wax museum and trains her as his assistant. There, they sculpt first the heads of philosophes, then famous murderers, and eventually victims of the guillotine. (Those make for much more portable models, being detached from their bodies.) Marie's fortunes rise and fall with the politics of the era: She becomes an art tutor to Louis XVI's sister Elisabeth, then spends a stint in the Carmes Prison (where she shares a cell with the future Josephine Bonaparte). Carey (Lungdon, 2015, etc.) channels the ghosts of Charles Dickens, Henry Fielding, and the Brothers Grimm to tell Marie's tale, populating it with grotesques and horrors worthy of Madame Tussaud's celebrated wax museum. Little drawings punctuate the text, like Boz's cartoons in Dickens' books; Carey's rumination on wax recalls Dickens' on dust. In Carey's hands, life blurs with death, nature with artifice; his objects seem as animated as people while his people can appear as fragile and impotent as objects. Dolls, houses, carts, furniture, tailors' dummies, and, of course, waxworks have human feelings: "I had never before considered that carriage clocks could be disapproving, nor had I supposed a candelabra might resent lighting me. I had never stepped upon a carpet that did not wish me there, nor felt the enmity of a marble mantelpiece. Nor had I come upon a gold-braided stool whose fat little feet seemed aimed at my ankles. Not before I entered this room." Curtius "seemed made of rods, of broom handles, of great lengths." This artful anthropomorphism (and its opposite) perfectly suits a novel about that most lifelike medium of sculpture, waxand its most famous modeler.A quirky, compelling story that deepens into a meditation on mortality and art. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.