Toads' Museum of Freaks and Wonders
Fiction. WP Award Series in the Novel. In the wake of a thwarted career as a concert pianist and the accompanying emotional fallout, Gin accepts a marriage proposal from the peculiar Mr. Toad. But nothing from the albino Gin Toad's upbringing in the bourgeois drawing rooms of Perth has prepared her for a hardscrabble existence on a subsistence farm in the Australian outback. In her Wyalkatchem exile, she explores what it means to be a mother and wife, an underappreciated musician, and the...
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I was an evil omen, a pale ghost whose own mother wouldn't have warmed her with a kiss. I would have married a bandicoot.In the wake of a thwarted career as a concert pianist and the accompanying emotional fallout, Gin accepts a marriage proposal from the peculiar Mr. Toad. But nothing from the albino Gin Toad's upbringing in the bourgeois drawing rooms of Perth has prepared her for a hardscrabble existence on a subsistence farm in the Australian outback.In her Wyalkatchem exile, she explores what it means to be a mother and wife, an underappreciated musician, and the town freak. She walks on eggshells to accommodate the cantankerous Toad and comes to accept her life without independence, music, or love—until Antonio arrives.I turned thirty the year the Italians came to our farm, and I was afraid of them, so afraid of those oversexed men we'd read about...men who were capable of anything.The Italian POWs forced into the Toads' service change the landscape of Gin's world. She is haunted by the memory of her first child's death; Antonio is exiled from a country and family he cherishes, banished to Western Australia while WWII threatens all he holds dear. In their mutual isolation and loss, the growing intimacy between Gin and Antonio becomes their escape from hardship—but will it also be their undoing?Toads' Museum of Freaks and Wonders was printed in Austrailia in 2009 under the title The Paperbark ShoePublishers WeeklyIn Goldbloom's prize-winning debut, set in 1943, albino Gin is a talented pianist living on a remote Australian farm with her bizarre, elfin husband Toad and their children, far removed from the life she once led in Perth: "I was an evil omen, a pale and hunched ghost whose own mother wouldn't have warmed her with a kiss." At 30, Gin is resigned to her lot in life, dictated by a genetic deformity that has kept her from a successful music career and dooms her to feeling like a sideshow act-until Italian prisoners of war arrive and everything changes. Gin identifies more with her newfound friend Antonio than with Toad, whom she had married after just one meeting, figuring no one else would offer. As she learns more about Toad's predilections, Gin draws closer to Antonio, learning to trust for the first time in her life. Goldbloom's writing deftly captures Gin's overwhelming isolation, reinforced by the unforgiving landscape, creating an unusual and haunting tale that will linger in readers' minds. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
\ Publishers WeeklyIn Goldbloom's prize-winning debut, set in 1943, albino Gin is a talented pianist living on a remote Australian farm with her bizarre, elfin husband Toad and their children, far removed from the life she once led in Perth: "I was an evil omen, a pale and hunched ghost whose own mother wouldn't have warmed her with a kiss." At 30, Gin is resigned to her lot in life, dictated by a genetic deformity that has kept her from a successful music career and dooms her to feeling like a sideshow act-until Italian prisoners of war arrive and everything changes. Gin identifies more with her newfound friend Antonio than with Toad, whom she had married after just one meeting, figuring no one else would offer. As she learns more about Toad's predilections, Gin draws closer to Antonio, learning to trust for the first time in her life. Goldbloom's writing deftly captures Gin's overwhelming isolation, reinforced by the unforgiving landscape, creating an unusual and haunting tale that will linger in readers' minds. \ Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.\ \
