The Hatbox Baby

On a sweltering summer morning in 1933, a baby is delivered in a hatbox to the Century of Progress Exposition the World's Fair in Chicago.

This very tiny baby, born three months early, is brought by his desperate young father to the fair's famous baby doctor, Leo Hoffman, to be saved. Dr. Hoffman part showman, part scientist finances his neonatal research by exhibiting a collection of live premature babies in their incubators. His Infantorium, with its giant test-tube fountain spouting pink-and-blue water and its pair of wading storks, attracts huge, gawking crowds every sultry day.

At the fair, a place of freaks and marvels, mysteries, miracles and even murders the notion of what is normal and what is not comes into questions daily. And before the summers ends and the fair closes, a number of remarkable persons will invest heavily in this fragile baby's life: Dr. Hoffman; his registered nurses; his wet nurses; the baby's spinster aunt; Caroline Day, the beautiful fan dancer and another of the fair's biggest attractions; and a dwarflike sideshow barker named St. Louis Percy, the fan dancer's cousin, manager, and bodyguard, whose stake in the hatbox baby's future becomes the most serious of all.

Inspired by the real life and work of a pioneering neonatologist, Carrie Brown once again delights us with a richly imagined story about the transforming power of love.