Category: Reviews

Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Small Museum by Jody Cooksley. My thanks to Helen at Helen Richardson PR for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Allison & Busby for my review copy via NetGalley. Do check out the posts by my tour buddies today, Clare at The Fallen Librarian, and Sara at Intensive Gassing About Books.

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About the Book

London, 1873. Madeleine Brewster’s marriage to Dr Lucius Everley was meant to be the solution to her family’s sullied reputation. After all, Lucius is a well-respected collector of natural curiosities, his ‘Small Museum’ of bones and things in jars is his pride and joy, although kept under lock and key. His sister Grace’s philanthropic work with fallen women is also highly laudable. However, Maddie is confused by and excluded from what happens in what is meant to be her new home.

Maddie’s skill at drawing promises a role for her though when Lucius agrees to let her help him in making a breakthrough in evolutionary science, a discovery of the first ‘fish with feet’. But the more Maddie learns about both Lucius and Grace, the more she suspects that unimaginable horrors lie behind their polished reputations. Framed for a crime that would take her to the gallows and leave the Everleys unencumbered, Maddie’s only hope is her friend Caroline Fairly. But will she be able to put the pieces together before the trial reaches its fatal conclusion?

Format: Hardcover (320 pages) Publisher: Allison & Busby
Publication date: 16th May 2024 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

The author has created a ‘small museum’ of her own, in this case a literary one, by bringing together all the elements you could wish for in a Victorian age historical mystery. In particular, it incorporates the macabre interest in the collection and display of anatomical curiosities as well as more outlandish theories about the evolution of species circulating at the time.

Poor Maddie, married off to Lucius in order to try to restore her family’s social standing following the ‘disgrace of her sister Rebecca, is pretty much a lamb to the slaughter. She cannot understand Lucius’ coldness towards her nor the fact that she is kept pretty much a prisoner in her new home which is run with ruthless efficiency by housekeeper, Mrs Barker. Lucius is invariably absent, either visiting patients or attending scientific meetings, so Maddie’s is a lonely existence, made worse by unsettling little things, such as the unexplained rearrangement of objects or the strange sounds she hears in the night. Could it be her imagination? Everyone seems anxious to convince her it is. Have a cup of cocoa and an early night, dear…

Maddie makes touching attempts to show interest in Lucius’s work in the hope of gaining his attention but it’s only when her artistic skill seems likely to assist his work that she gains a modicum of value in his eyes. Unfortunately, it will be a long time until she discovers what her real value to him is, and when she – and the reader – does, it’s positively shocking. Maddie badly needs a friend and Caroline Fairly proves a particularly steadfast one, along with Maddie’s maid, Tizzy, who risks her own wellbeing if she is discovered.

The book has a generous role call of villains. I’d single out Lucius’s sister, Grace, whose knack for gliding into rooms unexpectedly reminded me of Mrs Danvers in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. She willingly goes along with the gaslighting of Maddie whilst at the same time cultivating an air of philanthropy through her involvement in a home for fallen women (reminiscent of the establishment in Stacey Halls’s The Household). Then there are the Barkers, the Eversleys’ loyal retainers, a persistent malign prescence and whom, one suspects, know all the family’s dirty secrets. And, of course, there’s Lucius himself who for a long time seems to be just a coldly obsessive man determined to prove a theory he has developed. But what lengths will he go to in pursuit of that proof?

I particularly liked the use of chapter headings that describe some of the often quite macabre ‘curiosities’ in Lucius’s collection and the way the author subtly insinuated some of these into the story. I was fascinated to learn that some were inspired by actual exhibits in the Hunterian Museum in London.

The Small Museum is a chilling and immersive historical mystery generously infused with elements of Gothic fiction.

In three words: Creepy, dramatic, atmospheric
Try something similar: Things in Jars by Jess Kidd

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About the Author

Jody Cooksley studied literature at Oxford Brookes University and has a Masters in Victorian Poetry. Her debut novel The Glass House was a fictional account of the life of nineteenth-century photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. The Small Museum, Jody’s third novel, won the 2023 Caledonia Novel Award.

Jody is originally from Norwich and now lives in Cranleigh, Surrey.

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