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