Global Perspectives Book Club "Little"

Wednesday, December 11, 2024 @ 6pm

Global Perspectives is a group devoted to exploring history and looking at diverse perspectives through fiction.  The program is held monthly on the 2nd Wednesday of the month from October 2024-June 2025 at 6pm in the Carnegie Library meeting room. We alternate between discussing a book one month to viewing a movie the next month throughout the series. Be sure to join our Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/globalperspectivesbookclub or email arobertson@munpl.org if you would like to join our email list.

This Month's Book:

This month, we will read Little by Edward Carey, a novel set in France during the 18^th century.

Synopsis from Goodreads:

The wry, macabre, unforgettable tale of an ambitious orphan in Revolutionary Paris, befriended by royalty and radicals, who transforms herself into the legendary Madame Tussaud.

In 1761, a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess and saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling: The revolutionary mob is demanding heads, and... at the wax museum, heads are what they do.

In the tradition of Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, Edward Carey's Little is a darkly endearing cavalcade of a novel—a story of art, class, determination, and how we hold on to what we love.