With the help of magical Oddities, like a Pistol that never misses, Clover and her friends face a new danger, the ravenous Underking, in this riveting sequel to Oddity.
Despite Clover’s victory over the destructive Seamstress, war continues to rage between the fledgling Unified States and Napoléon Bonaparte. Clover and Nessa, former snake-oil salesgirl, join the Women’s Service League expecting to dole out soup and socks to invalids and orphans. Instead, under the direction of the wealthy and mysterious Miss Yamada, they’re tasked with rooting out the last of the pestilential Vermin—vicious creatures animated by magic, such as squirrel skins stuffed with nails, who have been terrorizing the countryside. But when the group is attacked by a new kind of monster—a sharp-toothed harehound with bloodshot eyes—they discover a much greater threat the grotesque Underking and his army of twisted creatures. With the help of a Paper-Doll Witch, an elegantly dressed skeleton, a girl bearing a Quilt with threatening properties, and Susanna the bad-tempered Doll, Clover and Nessa must defeat the Underking before he conquers the whole land. This follow-up to Oddity is a wildly imaginative and engrossing dark fantasy set in an alternate American past.
The series
In Eli Brown's Oddity series, magic does not belong to wizards or spellbooks. It hides inside things.
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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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