Guest Blogger Melanie Wolf

The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman is a story about looking and seeing.  The novel leads us to "look and see" beyond physical appearance to find the humanity and beauty of the individual.  It is a historical novel with two young people, a boy and a girl, whose lives become entwined in the telling of the story while coming to terms with who their fathers are as human beings. 

The girls father is obsessed with finding people and creatures with infirmities, including his daughter, treating them as monsters and using them on display in his museum.  He is a master of control and deceit.  This part of the novel is about where true humanity resides beyond the physical imperfection.

The other story is of a young man who goes in search of something.  Through the love of two older men he finds himself and his father, about whom he has had ill informed impressions since childhood.  Through photography he "looks and sees" beauty in the same people that the museum only finds revolting and curious.  His life lesson is the need to gather information from different angles before reaching a conclusion in his private investigations.  He uses this as well when judging his father, who he thought to be a coward.

This is a reminder to us about humanity and where true beauty lies in each of us.  MW