Toads’ Museum of Freaks and Wonders

$26.00 cloth | 321 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-930974-88-3
Publication Date: Feb 2010
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AWP Award Series in the Novel
Judge: Joanna Scott

“Toads’ Museum of Freaks and Wonders is a strange, mesmerizing tale about characters uncomfortably defined by superficial eccentricities. It is also a wrenching love story.”
—Joanna Scott, Judge

“I have never read anything quite like this, nor has anyone else. The voice is acid, funny, at first commonsensical and un-self-pitying, later lyrical, later madly deluded; the voice is gorgeous, it is brilliant. How Goldie Goldbloom makes us feel the absolute reality of another human soul while simultaneously making us shriek with laughter is beyond me. But this is exactly what she does, and the result is dazzling.”
—Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever

“Toad’s Museum, oh, it’s a wonder. Told in the beautiful, wildly irresistible, darkly playful cadences and idioms of West Australia. And every part of it feels both dreamlike and true. Feels like it could only have happened in this harsh place, been told in these shimmering words, by this supremely gifted writer”
—Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses

“What an astonishing book this is! Goldie Goldbloom’s book runs like a live current between poles of emotion, searing a path between delight and pain, the local and the universal, and finally between love and loss. I can’t remember when I last heard a new voice as exhilarating as this.”
—Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After

” . . . extraordinary . . . one of the most original Australian novels I’ve read for a long time.”
—Sydney Morning Herald

” . . . it is apparent from the first few pages that you are in the hands of a mater; Goldbloom writes with clarity and complexity, balancing abstract questions of identity, love, and value with a tensely developed plot and rich characters.”
—Alex Myers, NewPages.com

” . . . a fascinating tale of small town life in Australia and romance, highly recommended.”
—Midwest Book Review, May 2010

“The tale plays out with idiosyncratic humor and melodic, lucid prose. Gin isn’t the spunky heroine of The Bridges of Madison County or My Brilliant Career; she’s complex, haunted, perverse and impulsive. . . . Vivid, indeed–an accomplished work.”
—Laurie Sullivan, ForeWord Magazine

” . . . one of the oddest and most wonderful books I’ve read in a long time. . . . while this might sound like the making of a familiar, traditional love story, Toad’s Museum is anything but.”
—Trish Crapo, Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 27, No. 5

Goldie Goldbloom

Goldie Goldbloom’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming inStoryQuarterly, Narrative andPrairie Schooner, as well as in anthologies in Australia and the USA. She won the 2008 AWP Novel Award and the Jerusalem Post International Fiction Prize. Her stories have been translated into more than ten languages. She lives in Chicago with her eight children.