Oddity

Illustrated by Karin Rytter.

The daughter of a murdered physician vows to protect the magical Oddity he left behind in an alternate nineteenth century where a failed Louisiana Purchase has locked a young Unified States into conflict with France.

It’s the early 1800s, and Clover travels the impoverished borderlands of the Unified States with her father, a physician. See to the body before you, he teaches her, but Clover can’t help becoming distracted by bigger things, including the coming war between the US and France, ignited by a failed Louisiana Purchase, and the terrifying vermin, cobbled together from dead animals and spare parts, who patrol the woods. Most of all, she is consumed with interest for Oddities, ordinary objects with extraordinary abilities, such as a Teapot that makes endless amounts of tea and an Ice Hook that freezes everything it touches.

Clover’s father has always disapproved of Oddities, but when he is murdered, Clover embarks on a perilous mission to protect the one secret Oddity he left behind. And as she uncovers the truth about her parents and her past, Clover emerges as a powerful agent of history. Here is an action-filled American fantasy of alternate history to rival the great British fantasies in ideas and scope.

Amazon: View on Amazon →

Fantasy Young Adult Alternate History Western 19th century

Release date: March 2021

Book Order

Your Rating

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Add to Bookshelf

Join the Discussion

You can post as a guest or sign in for more features.

Have questions about this book or want to share your thoughts? Join the conversation!

Eli Brown

Eli Brown is an American author whose fiction has moved from pirate ships and impossible meals to an alternate nineteenth-century America filled with dangerous magical objects. Adventure, history, food, folklore, and a taste for the peculiar frequently overlap in his stories, giving even his darkest worlds a playful streak.

Brown studied painting and sculpture before turning his creative attention toward fiction, later earning an MFA from Mills College. His working life has been nearly as varied as his books: he has been a groundskeeper, massage therapist, and stay-at-home father. He is also a Yaddo fellow and has appeared as a featured reader at San Francisco's Litquake literary festival. He lives with his family in Northern California.

His first novel, The Great Days, was published in 2008 and won the Fabri Prize for Literature. The story explored the unsettling world of a cult, but Brown's next major novel took him in a very different direction. Cinnamon and Gunpowder combined historical adventure, piracy, romance, and an unusually important ingredient: cooking.

Set in 1819, Cinnamon and Gunpowder follows chef Owen Wedgwood after he is kidnapped by pirate captain Mad Hannah Mabbot. His survival depends on preparing an extraordinary meal for her every Sunday, despite the decidedly limited pantry of a pirate ship. Brown developed the idea partly from his own interests in food and history, creating a seafaring adventure in which elaborate meals become as important to the story as battles and pursuit. The novel became an NPR Best Book of 2013, was a finalist for the California Book Award, and was selected for San Francisco Public Library's One City One Book program.

Brown later turned toward fantasy for younger readers with Oddity. His fascination with mythology and magical objects stretches back to childhood, when he was drawn to things such as Bilbo's ring, Jack's magic beans, Odysseus's bag of winds, and the extraordinary artifacts found throughout old stories. In Oddity, that fascination becomes the foundation of an alternate American history where seemingly ordinary objects can possess extraordinary powers.

The novel follows Clover Elkin, the daughter of a frontier doctor, as she becomes caught up in a dangerous struggle involving magical Oddities and a version of nineteenth-century America whose history has taken a very different course. Brown returned to this world in Mooncussers, expanding its mythology as Clover and her companions encounter new magical objects and a growing threat in an America still at war with Napoleon.

Although his novels range from literary fiction to historical adventure and middle-grade fantasy, Brown repeatedly gravitates toward worlds that feel slightly larger and stranger than expected. A meal can become a means of survival, a familiar object can conceal impossible power, and history can turn down a road it never followed in our world. That curiosity about the hidden possibilities of ordinary things gives his fiction its distinctive sense of adventure.

Oddity

In Eli Brown's Oddity series, magic does not belong to wizards or spellbooks. It hides inside things.

An ordinary-looking object might possess an impossible ability: a pistol that never misses, an ice hook that freezes whatever it touches, a teapot that never runs dry. Known as Oddities, these magical artifacts are coveted, feared, traded, and fought over in an alternate nineteenth-century America where history has taken a decidedly stranger course.

Clover Elkin has always been fascinated by them, even though her physician father wants nothing to do with such dangerous objects. When he is murdered and leaves behind a secret Oddity, Clover is pulled into a world she has only imagined from a distance. Protecting what her father entrusted to her soon becomes inseparable from discovering the truth about her family, and from understanding why certain people will kill to possess the magic scattered across the country.

The America surrounding her is familiar only at first glance. Napoleon Bonaparte remains a powerful enemy, war continues to reshape the fledgling Unified States, and the wilderness harbors creatures born from forces that do not belong in conventional history. As Clover's journey expands, so does the strange ecology of the world around her, from enchanted objects with unpredictable personalities to Vermin animated by magic and monsters that seem assembled from nightmare and folklore.

Yet the Oddities themselves are more than convenient magical tools. Some are useful, some absurd, and others genuinely frightening, but each suggests a world in which power can reside in the most unlikely places. Clover gradually learns that possessing such power and knowing what to do with it are very different things.

The series grows darker and wider with Mooncussers, as Clover and her companions confront new magical threats while war continues in the background. Friendship becomes increasingly important as she encounters other young people whose lives have also been shaped by extraordinary objects, creating a band of outsiders who must rely on one another when the dangers around them become too large to face alone.

Blending alternate history, dark fantasy, adventure, and touches of steampunk, Oddity imagines an American past filled with peculiar magic and wonderfully unsettling creatures. Beneath its inventions and battles, however, lies a coming-of-age story about curiosity, courage, grief, and a girl discovering that history is not something that simply happens around her. She may have a hand in changing it.

Oddity consists of two books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.

★ 7.50 (16)

★ 7.76 (4)