The Fascination by Essie Fox follows twins Keziah and Tilly Lovell in Victorian England. Identical in countenance, except Tilly stopped growing as a child. Marketed as a traveling “freakshow” by their own abusive father to sell his snake oil cure-all, the twins soon draw the attention of the mysterious Captain and the curious Theo Seabrook.
Keziah and Tilly are essentially sold by their father to the Captain, and the girls are taken to the man’s grand manor hall. Here, they come to find a family of society’s outcasts and misfits. Martha, a young woman with a cleft pallet, and Aleski, a man with hypertrichosis. The family of misfits puts on pantomimes for the theatres of London, and it is here that Theo is reunited with the twins. Theo, now in London, works in a museum of anatomical curiosities–sometimes asked to craft his own creations of juxtaposed parts. But Theo longs to someday put his anatomical and surgical talents toward medical school.
Theo, Keziah, and Tilly get caught up in a dark underbelly of fetishized anatomical anomalies, with Tilly in particular targeted. The woman and ostensible leader of this underground society has quite a “villain exposes her grand plan in the end scene” moment, which I found a bit cliche as well as lacking in believable motivation other than to satisfy curiosities. What’s more, there is a bit of an unexpected revelation about Theo toward the very end of the book. I wonder if the author chose not to reveal this specific detail so that the reader would not judge him before?
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