Dreamland Social Club

by Tara Altebrando

[Joni Reads]

A truly wonderful tale full of freaks of all kinds. I received an ARC of this from Shelf Awareness a while back and it took a while for me to get to it in my TBR pile. I wasn’t sure I would like it but decided to give it a chance and I am glad that I am. Who in the US has not heard of Coney Island. We all are familiar with at least the name but this book makes it feel like you are there. As well as being a fantastic fiction novel, it brings up the issues of Coney Island, how it appears to be falling apart and the various plans to fix it up.
The books revolves around Jane after she and her brother inherit their grandfather’s house on Coney Island. Her mother, who grew up on Coney, died when she was five or six and Jane and her brother Marcus have been living with their father, a roller coaster designer, ever since. They traveled from country to country and only plan to stay on Coney for a year, enough time to clean out the house and sell it.
Jane’s grandparents were sideshows on Coney Island. Her grandfather, whose name was Preemie, was part of a show about premature babies when incubators were first invented and her grandmother, Birdie, was- you guessed it- the half bird half human lady. So Jane must have some type of quirk, right? Wrong. Right from the start it is plain to see that Jane is perfectly normal. Her wardrobe consists of mainly the color grey and when they first pull up to their new house the first thing she notices is a grammar error on a sign posted to the fence. So naturally she expects to make friends with normal kids at Coney Island High, but for some reason she is drawn to the freaks.
Her first friend is Babette, a goth midget, followed by Legs, a giant, H.T., a boy with no legs, Rita, a contortionist, and of course Leo, a beautiful tattooed boy whose tattoos are strikingly familiar to Jane. She knows they only plan to stay for a year but the more she learns about Coney the more she begins to care about it. Add on top of that a secret set of keys she finds hidden in her house, an attic that may as well be a Coney Island museum, and signs for a secret club that her mother was the founder of popping up around school and Jane is sure that whatever she expected out of Coney Island, she is getting much more out of it.
I fell in love with the characters. They were all so unique and I kept thinking about how I would react to going to school with someone like H.T. who has no legs or someone like Legs who is seven and a half feet tall. The only issue I had was that I found myself getting confused when certain characters were mentioned. For example, Jane’s lab partner, Venus, is mentioned in one scene when they first meet and then maybe twenty pages later she is mentioned again and I had no clue who she was. I had to skip back to find where she was first mentioned to figure it out. And with Legs and I was confused as to what his “freak” quality was. It’s not told straight out so I kinda had to infer it. But I loved how the story was part mystery of Jane finding out things about her mother. Also, I loved the scenes when she was exploring the attic and the descriptions of the artifacts on Coney Island. It made me want to visit there. Actually, it made me feel familiar with a place I had never been before. Only a special kind of book can do that and this book more than qualifies.
All in all, the characters were well written, the story line magical and the pace fast moving. An excellent book about not only looking past a person’s appearance but also about the politics behind one of the most famous places in the United States. Not to be passed up.