Hand delivers another brilliant mystery ... Pin is a first-rate heroine...Hand juxtaposes Pin’s concealment of her gender with the killer’s obsession with dressing dolls, making Pin’s anxiety about her identity all the more resonant ... packed with evocative historical detail of Chicago and its amusement park ... Hand’s rendering of Darger’s Tourettic tics is just one of many deft touches in her wonderfully imaginative and richly delivered narrative ... While the amusement park setting enables Hand to ramp up the tension with a toolbox of strange and creepy people and places to play with, she never falls prey to pointless sensationalism. This makes Pin’s story — her quest to discover the truth, not just about what happened in Hell Gate, but about who she is and how she might find a place in the world — more vivid.
Told in short, deft chapters that include both Darger and the killer’s perspectives (which may or may not be one and the same), the novel pays as much attention to narrative twists and turns as it does to the delights of burgeoning modernity ... Curious Toys is chockablock with engrossing historical asides ... Darger’s artistic preoccupations, as well as his many eccentricities, could become clunky plot-weights in other hands, but Hand gives his unreliability a chiaroscuro quality. We are not sure whether to trust him, but like Pin, we want to. The novel’s overarching ambience of terror is never sacrificed during its more idiosyncratic historical detours. 'Dark ride' doesn’t just describe the lurid indoor amusements contained in Hell Gate—it’s an apt summary of Curious Toys and all its shadowy diversions. These crop up in herky-jerky rhythms, lurching out at the reader like midway barkers or costumed nightmares stalking a haunted house. Behind the carnival facades and film sets, the sense of dread is all too real.
... [a] brilliant, bustling historical mystery ... while Hand paces her mystery with classic precision, the real reward of Curious Toys lies in its richly textured panorama of Chicago during a crucial period of change, and in its vivid characters. Riverview, of course, is legendary among older Chicagoans, and Hand presents it not as a generic carnival-murder setting, but as a kind of distorting mirror of cultural anxieties, many of which are still with us today ... Hand’s research is not merely for display, but rather shows us what sorts of things her characters might plausibly have been thinking about in 1915 ... Even with such skillfully rendered secondary characters, the emotional weight of the novel rests on Pin and Darger ... Hand only occasionally risks giving us a glimpse into Darger’s troubled thinking and wisely refrains from making him into an idiot-savant detective, but she offers a persuasive portrait of how a damaged genius with an obsession to protect children might have interacted with the chaotic Chicago of his time, where children really were endangered on a daily basis. How Darger finally affects Pin, and how she affects him, lead to a moving and thought-provoking conclusion.
With short, breathlessly paced chapters and constantly shifting points of view, Curious Toys is itself like a carnival ride: alternatively dazzling and terrifying, disorienting and marvelous ... Darger’s work also explored themes of sexuality and gender identity, themes that are expanded and amplified in Curious Toys.
Hand beautifully captures the era in this historical novel alongside the landscape of Chicago and its neighborhoods and slums ... She also captures the remarkable world of the amusement park, from the rides and the midway to the sideshow freaks ... The world Hand creates is more than just a backdrop for a crime. The locations act as a character ... One of Hand’s remarkable abilities is the deftness with which she creates dynamic and unique voices for each point-of-view character, helping the reader track multiple storylines throughout a complex tale ... Despite its historical setting, Pin’s contemplations about gender identity, the inclusion of racial tensions, and questions regarding police behavior, place the story squarely in a modern context ... Regardless of connections to the present, Hand presents us with a detailed and complex representation of the challenges for impoverished and psychologically fragile individuals in 1915 America ... Equally important, in the midst of it all, Hand fashions a darn good mystery.
... chiefly compelling for its smart, streetwise, complicated protagonist, teenage Pin — and for the careful and vivid evocation of Pin's Chicago circa 1915, with all of its sordid glories ... serves as a fictional version of the events that could have inspired Darger's obsessive work. It is therefore obsessed with Darger's obsessions — and that is where Curious Toys gets itself into trouble it does not need to be in ... the delightful evocation of Chicago and the truly excellent and exciting pacing and prose in this book do not do enough to make up for its shortcomings. Most clearly and frustratingly, the serial killer is revealed to be a cross-dressing carnival showman, Max. He's referred to throughout the book as 'She-Male,' presumably after the name of his half-man-half-woman act — it's a period-appropriate epithet, certainly, but winceworthy. Worse is the inevitable association of pedophilia with cross-dressing that this choice of identity for the killer implies. I was profoundly disappointed by the lack of forethought on Hand's part, especially considering the complexity of her Chicago and her otherwise careful handling of racial and gender biases in the 1910s ... in combination with the cross-dressing serial killer Max, Pin's cross-dressing-while-butch reads as a condemnation of genderqueerness: Max is both male and female, and horrific; while Pin is cisgendered and righteous ... Hand has let Darger's obsessions run away with the story and not been careful enough with her characterizations to avoid a truly unpleasant aftertaste.
... [a] whipsmart thriller ... Hand, a genre-hopping master of dark suspense, writes the holy hell out of the scene ... Hand makes the Hell Gate a richly layered study of horror and sin, sex and truth, American piety and American reality. But she does so without fuss or strain, glancing up against the big ideas so gently that, as Pin bumps along in her little boat, readers can feel like we’re the ones coming up with them. She has crafted Curious Toys as a tense, short-chaptered contemporary thriller, the kind where you might think “I’ll read just two more pages” and then catch yourself having gulped down twenty. Yet like Pin herself the novel is something much more complex than it at first might appear ... Hand has pared down her wordcounts while still saying everything that needs to be said ... Hand doesn’t say less these days, but she suggests more. Every detail is telling; every scene essential; every theme nudged toward readers to think about for ourselves ... the frisson of surprise insights is as reliable a pleasure here as the suspense plotting.
... [a] perfectly modulated drop-kick ending ... Hand carefully inserts a few chapters from the chilling point of view of the actual murderer, a figure worthy of Thomas Harris, whose creepy obsessions with dolls and little girls’ clothes are more than enough to give the novel overtones of a horror story. Hand’s research into Chicago history is impeccable without ever seeming gratuitous, and even secondary characters such as Chaplin and Hecht emerge as fascinating and complex. But the story— which tightens its spiral as neatly as any murder mystery—finally belongs to Pin and Darger, and mostly to Pin, an absolutely marvelous creation who, in the superb ending, turns out to be far more than we expected.
Dazzlingly versatile in style, format and subject matter ... The supporting cast includes a number of...vivid personalities ... She vividly conjures up an era when women and girls were regarded as poseable objects, and the serial killer main plot certainly hammers that theme home ... a thriller to be savored—tough, funny, strange and revelatory.
... a deliciously creepy setting ... echoes the atrocities of H.H. Holmes during the 1893 Exposition as chronicled in The Devil in the White City, and several characters reference those murders. While Curious Toys doesn't quite measure up to Erik Larson's award-winning nonfiction, Hand's gripping plot mines the era's vagaries with aplomb.
Hand’s vividly imagined mystery immerses readers in the gritty world of 1915 Chicago, where Victorian conventions are giving way to a more modern world ... [a] richly drawn cast of outsiders and misfits ... A few chapters are told from Charlie Chaplin’s point of view...But his presence is mostly an unnecessary distraction and seems like an opportunity for the author to demonstrate the extent of her meticulous research ... Hand’s characters are fascinating, and the mystery at the novel’s core is both compelling and creepy ... Hand fully exploits the narrative possibilities of her setting, immersing readers in the colorful, vibrant world of Riverview. As a result, Curious Toys never lacks for atmosphere, though the story sometimes sags under the author’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach.
Hand expertly plays the excitement of Chicago’s burgeoning entertainment industry against the killer’s unsettling obsession with dolls, twisting the story even darker ... A well-crafted and deliciously unsettling period thriller that will find fans among those who enjoy Caleb Carr’s mix of early modern technology and investigative action.
Genre-spanning, award-winning Hand once again works the dark side of the street, writing from multiple points of view and skillfully misdirecting readers’ attention. The historical details are fantastic ... When readers reach the end of this thrilling adventure, they’ll see how every choice has been perfectly made ... Hand is a mage of the page.
[An] atmospheric crime novel ... Though Hand’s attempts to establish multiple viable suspects, all with disturbing, if confusing, psychological histories, muddy the narrative, this remains a phantasmagoric time trip tailor-made for fans of The Devil in the White City.
To call the novel and its characters 'colorful' is a terrific understatement ... Hand skillfully develops each character beyond mere oddity or empty sensation ... Pin is an engaging, courageous heroine, and her musings on gender identity are both poignant and relevant. Richly imaginative and psychologically complex.
