Addie's Eyes by Tim Landry; A Historical Fantasy About Disabilities, Dreams, and Misfits

 

Addie's Eyes by Tim Landry; A Historical Fantasy About Disabilities, Dreams, and Misfits 

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: Addie's Eyes by Tim Landry is a wholesome enchanting Historical Fantasy which combines early 20th century entertainment, including sideshow attractions and dream worlds. It's also a compelling story about two misfits who are united against a real world that doesn't understand them and a fantasy world of their own imagination. It is old fashioned in settings, theme, and style but that is what makes the book timeless the way many youthful fantasies like Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of OZ are.

In 1884 Liverpool, Addie Alexander is a blind girl who works and lives at her father, Ezra’s, Ruby Palace Theater.  The latest entertainer is Fedor Jeftichew, AKA Jo Jo The Dog Face Boy, a sideshow performer with hypertrichosis, an abnormal amount of hair growth on his body. Rachel, Addie's teacher, is leaving for another job, so she feels lonely. She befriends Fedor who tells the blind girl that he is just an assistant who looks after the Dog Faced Boy. The two develop a close friendship that threatens the act when her father and his manager catch them. Fedor leaves for another performance, Addie follows after him, and  is knocked into a coma. While she is in her coma, she dreams of a fantasy kingdom where she can see and travel to different worlds based on hers and Fedor’s imagination.

The book has two distinct parts, the first is a more straightforward Historical Fiction. The second detailing Addie's dream is a Fantasy. These two distinct parts tell a unique story that covers both tones admirably.

The first half is genuinely touching but also has a savage bite. The bite is caused by the focus on people with disabilities and physical abnormalities, some of which are displayed for others amusement. This was an actual source of entertainment which is now seen as exploitative and dehumanizing. 

I highly recommend the book, Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities by Frederick Drimmer for more information on sideshows and their entertainers. In fact, Fedor/JoJo is a fictionalized version of a real life performer of the same name. This amalgam of putting a real-life sideshow entertainer in this fictional setting shows the faint line between fantasy and reality that is so prevalent throughout the book. 

The most heartfelt chapters focus on the relationship between Addie and Fedor. Fedor is raised to expose his differences to a thirsty, drawing, and often fickle crowd. He can’t hide who he is so he has to play a part. He is used to being stared at, so he turns it into an opportunity. He is highly intelligent, creative, and adaptable. He suggests different things to add to the act, like acrobatics or recitations to draw bigger crowds and provide more money for himself and his manager/guardian, Charlie.

Addie’s blindness also makes her an oddity as well. Unlike Fedor, she is trained to hide. She occasionally greets visitors but mostly she works behind the scenes at the theater, gathering props, moving the curtain, and running errands for her father and the performers. She usually has to stay in the theater with minimal contact except for Ezra, Rachel, and Patrick, a stagehand.

 It’s no wonder that she’s so distraught when Rachel announces her impending departure. She didn’t just lose a teacher, she lost a mentor, mother figure, and one of her few contacts with the outside world. It’s also understandable why Addie bonds with Fedor. He is one of the entertainers, but he actually takes the time to talk to her and treat her like a real person and not part of the faceless help.

Like Fedor, Addie too shows an imaginative and creative spirit. In her private areas backstage, she treats the abandoned props like toys and makes up stories about them. This helps facilitate Fedor’s creativity. Fedor and Addie build a true friendship through their dual imaginations. To the rest of society they are misfits and outsiders, so their bond is that of two kindred spirits united because of a world that fears or shelters them.

Fedor weaves tales about being a prince of a land called Zymia. Addie tells her own imaginary tales. As lonely children often do, they are connected through their fantastic stories. As long as they are in their imagination, they can be brave, attractive, heroic, the people that they feel they are not. They create a world where Fedor doesn’t have to pretend to be a separate person from Jojo and Addie can go outside and see the environment that she pictures in her head. The fantasy that they create becomes real for Addie after their separation and her coma. 

The fantasy aspects are similar to many of the similar stories from the 19th century. Addie comes to the world with weird characters who see her as some kind of hero and she is sent on a quest for a specific goal. In this case to find Fedor, who is their missing prince just like in his stories. It gives one the overall impression that this experience is intentionally based on those stories because they were ones that Addie told herself, that Rachel read or encouraged her to read, or that she and Fedor shared. 

Many of the lands and characters that Addie sees are products of a child’s imagination and create a charming world that one would definitely want to escape into if given the chance. She befriends a terrapin (not a turtle as he reminds us), named Brother. There is also a tall lean figure made up of various blocks called Toybox. They accompany Addie on her journey. She also sees mysterious shadowy figures that could either help or harm her. 

The different lands are made of themes like candy, toys, musical instruments, and others that please the senses. In a way, they are like those AI clips which show variations of the same idea like a bedroom in various weird styles decorated with wildlife, oceans, or Outer Space.

For  Addie who has been living in a world of darkness and had to guess through her senses and imaginations how things looked, it is a transformative experience. That’s probably part of why this dreamscape is described so bizarre and outlandish. The Readers are visualizing it through the perspective of someone who can see for the first time and is aware how beautiful, strange, and off putting the world around her can be. Also why the thought of darkness moving across the land would be so traumatic to her. It’s a dream world that relies on the reality of the dreamer. 

In fact, unlike most versions of this trope, the Reader is made aware that this is definitely a dream. While Addie is in this coma going on her imaginative journey, we are provided chapters from the points of view of Ezra and Rachel as they watch over her and Fedor as he leaves Charlie to returns to the Ruby Palace. It's an interesting and original touch to this type of story, though it somewhat drags in parts. 

Sometimes, Readers like the fantasy of escapism and want to believe that at least temporarily the protagonist is there and that this is a real experience.  We don’t always want to be reminded that it isn’t. We get the idea when we read about things that are actually composites of real world objects and characters. Or that a meaningless conversation in reality takes precedence in the dream. Or hey the dream provides a solution to a problem or a lesson to be learned.

Though, as with many of these stories there are a couple of later revelations that blur the dream world and the real world. That makes these real world views even more arbitrary and questionable. But that is a minor issue in a book that combines History and Fantasy to tell a story that any outsider or misfit can relate to or understand.

Forgotten Favorites: Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities by Frederick Drimmer; An Amazing Biography of Some Very Special People Indeed

Forgotten Favorites: Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities by Frederick Drimmer; An Amazing Biography of Some Very Special People Indeed


By Julie Sara Porter


Bookworm Reviews





In the 2017 musical biopic of P.T. Barnum, The Greatest Showman, the sideshow performers such as Charles “General Tom Thumb” Stratton, a little person, Chang and Eng, conjoined twins, and Lettie Lutz, a bearded lady crash a swank party that they have been denied entry by the party goers and Barnum himself. They sing the triumphant Oscar nominated song, “This Is Me” where they admit that yes they are different, but they will persevere despite the derision of others. It's a stirring unforgettable moment.


Fans of movies of the Golden Age of Hollywood may be familiar with the 1931 film, Freaks which deals with a conniving trapeze artist and her strong man lover who conspire to murder her husband, Hans, a little person, for his fortune. Most of the movie’s cast includes various real life sideshow performers including Violet and Daisy Hilton, a pair of conjoined twins (whose characters get engaged during the movie), Lady Olga, a bearded lady (who in the movie gives birth to a daughter fathered by Pete Robinson, a human skeleton), Johnny Eck, a legless man, Frances O’Connor, an armless woman, Prince Randion, who was born with neither arms or legs (but in the movie shows he is capable of lighting and smoking a cigarette), and Harry and Daisy Doll, a brother and sister team of little people who play the main character, Hans, and his female friend, Freida. (The DVD/Blu-ray of the movie includes a documentary in which each performer’s lives are described before and after Freak’s release.)





Even though they were made 87 years apart, both The Greatest Showman and Freaks show the struggles faced by people who were once called “Freaks”, or “Human Oddities.” People who look different because they are too short, too tall, are conjoined, have white albino skin, are missing arms and legs, are bearded women and many others. Their stories were stories of constant struggles of being accepted by society including families who constantly worried about them, smothered, or abandoned them, finding work (most of which ended up working in sideshows), and finding acceptance or love. Author, Frederick Drimmer gathered their stories in his 1976 book, Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities. Many of these people may not be well-known to modern Readers, but they are unforgettable in their strengths, determination, and willingness to make a life for themselves. Each story seems to say, (to quote the song): “ I am brave/I am bruised/I am who I’m meant to be/This is me.”





The stories are divided into eight parts and 34 chapters which explore various people sorted by their abnormalities. They are moving, heartwarming, honest, and even at times humorous (when asked if she would March in the Easter Parade, the bearded Lady Olga said “Absolutely not, someone may mistake (her) for a Supreme Court Justice.”) Above all, they are inspirational. Not many Readers would forget the story of Hermann Carl Unthan, a man born without arms who became an accomplished violinist and also learned to swim, ride horseback, and target shoot with his legs.





Another fascinating story is that of Violet and Daisy Hilton, the conjoined twins who appeared not only in the film, Freaks but in another movie called Chained For Life. The two were abused by their guardian and her husband until they came of legal age and took their guardians to court. The Hilton Sisters had short-lived marriages but played the saxophone in vaudeville and befriended such performers as Bob Hope (who taught them how to dance) and Harry Houdini (who taught them to mentally block each other out when they wanted alone time.).





There is also the chapter about Julia Pastrana, a Mexican woman with hair on her face, arms, and legs. She also captivated audiences with her graceful dancing and singing in both English and her native Spanish.





One of the most well known stories was that of Joseph Carey Merrick AKA, The Elephant Man, an Englishman with neurofibromatosis, a skin condition which causes lesions and tumors all over the body. Merrick was the subject of the play and movie, The Elephant Man, the latter of which was directed by David Lynch and starred Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt as Merrick. Told by Merrick’s friend and mentor, Sir Frederick Treves, The Elephant Man’s chapter is about a man frequently shunned, abused, and put on display by a cold and uncaring public only to be permitted to permanently reside at the London Hospital and became a celebrity because of his kind amiable personality and childlike nature. Merrick made use of a dressing kit, even though he couldn't use its contents, by imagining that he was a dandy man-about-town. After he attended a pantomime of Puss in Boots with Treves (hidden behind a boxed seat curtain), Merrick spoke about the play as though it was a real event asking questions like “Do you suppose that poor man is still in the dungeon?”





One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is how it goes to extremes from people with too many limbs to those who don't have enough and from people who are below and above average height. Robert Pershing Wadlow, who was dubbed the Alton Giant because of his vast height, was one such example. By the time he began school, he wore clothes that fit a 17 year old and by the time he was eight, he passed his hand-me-downs to his father. The chapter is filled with moments where Wadlow held silverware that seemed doll house-like in his hands, where he had to lay hotel beds side to side so he could get a good night's sleep, and above all where a slight fracture could lead to debilitating problems later. Wadlow’s excessive height caused the calcium in his bones to be weakened and he died at the young age of 27 when he was 8 ft 11.1 inches tall. Nonetheless he made good money as the spokesperson for a St. Louis based shoe company that offered him free shoes as a bonus. (Something he desperately needed since he outgrew shoes almost as soon as he received them.)





From the problems of the very tall to those experienced by the very small and Drimmer shows that in the section describing little people, one of whom was Charles Sherwood Stratton who went under the stage name “General Tom Thumb Jr..” Drimmer writes that Stratton could not reach doorknobs without help, was often unable to get out of beds that were high off the ground, and was unable to do many of the physical tasks in his small town of mostly farmers and whalers. After he was introduced to P.T. Barnum, Stratton became a consummate performer who sang, danced, and did imitations of people like Napoleon. In his years of show business, Stratton met many notables like Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln (who hosted Stratton's White House wedding to fellow little person, Lavinia Warren.)





While many people look down on sideshows today saying they were exploitative, Drummer's writing reveals that in the time period in which many of these human oddities lived, there weren't too many other opportunities for employment or acceptance for people with extreme physical abnormalities. Sideshows not only hired them but the performers often found love and friendship among others who were equally physically different. (That closeness even spread during the off-season when many human oddities settled in Gibsonton, Florida, a small town outside of Sarasota. According to Drimmer’s book, so-called normal residents of Gibsonton were so used to the human oddity population that they treated them like any other local as fellow citizens, schoolmates, church goers, and PTA members.)





Very Special People shows that despite the exterior, the human spirit can triumph within individuals. It also shows that anyone at anytime could be an outcast. This idea is best demonstrated in the introduction in which Drimmer's daughter dreamed that her arms disappeared and she was mocked and jeered at by the people around her. “Stop looking at me like that,” she screamed. “What if I am physically different from you? I am still a human being! Treat me like one! I have the same-exactly the same feelings as you! I am you!”