Freaks

Gr 5–8—Larwood takes readers to gritty parts of Victorian London in this novel about performers in a freak show. There's actually little performance involved in their nightly exhibitions. It's more a matter of letting people gawk at their physical anomalies or unusual proclivities. Sheba the Wolfgirl is covered in fur; Mama Rat has a troupe of trained rodents; Gigantus is (as you might surmise) a giant; Sister Moon is a ninja; and Monkeyboy has a tail. When they learn that young children have been disappearing from the riverbanks, the misfits use their strangeness to their advantage, solving the mysterious kidnappings and thwarting evildoers. Much is attempted in this book, but the development of plot, characters, and setting is superficial and unconvincing. Larwood resorts far too frequently to the scatological humor of Monkeyboy, who delights in fouling the air with gaseous emissions and any available surface or receptacle with his fecal matter, which pales rather quickly. The combination of the improbable and the impossible sits uneasily beside Larwood's efforts to depict the grim realities of underclass life in 19th-century England.—Miriam Lang Budin, Chappaqua Library, NY