The Hatbox Baby
By Carrie Brown
$22.95
ISBN 1565122992

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The Hatbox Baby by Carrie Brown is a hopeful book. The main characters are decent people who have allowed their lives to drift into patterns that no longer work. Set at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, the novel leads the reader through the characters' growth from stagnation to the possibility of rebirth.

The birth of a very small premature baby sets in motion the events that will change many lives. Dr. Leo Hoffman runs the Infantorium, an exhibit of 21 tiny premature babies in incubators. The controversial exhibit generates funds to nurse the babies and to study ways to improve their care. The doctor feels an immediate affinity for the three-month-early baby boy brought by his father in a hatbox. The fascination of the child also draws St. Louis Percy, a freakish sideshow barker who leads the father to the Infantorium. St. Louis' cousin, Caroline Day, a beautiful fan dancer and the fair's main attraction, witnesses the father's senseless death later that day, and she too is drawn into the orbit of the tiny child.

The lives of the compassionate but austere doctor, the quiet stripper and the capricious near-dwarf gradually begin to intertwine. St. Louis has been Caroline's protector since adolescence, yet feels the need to move on. Caroline, the least explained and perhaps most fascinating character, is filled with unexpressed yearnings. Dr. Hoffman daily balances the good he accomplishes against the social strictures that threaten his work, unwritten rules which he himself mirrors. All three share St. Louis' anxiety, "that one morning he would wake up to find a cold stone wall close up before his face, all his chances for escape sealed over." When Caroline and the doctor become lovers, the lives of the three accelerate toward an inevitable and ultimately liberating climax.

As in her previous award-winning novels, Rose's Garden and Lamb in Love, Brown leaves the reader with a profound sense of possibility. An unnamed baby rearranges three disparate lives; The Hatbox Baby challenges the reader to examine and perhaps rearrange his or her own.

Mary Carol Moran teaches the Novel Writers' Workshop for the Auburn University Outreach Program in Auburn, Alabama, and at conferences around the country.