Anna Marie Grosholtz (later Madame Tussaud) had the fortune (or misfortune) to be born in interesting times. In Edward Carey’s fictionalized biography of the famous wax artists, Little, we watch the diminutive woman rise from orphan to tutor to a princess before falling into prison as a near victim of the Reign of Terror only to rise again in London. While there are elements of this story that didn’t happen in real life, quite a lot of what happens in this book is true (at least, as far as I can tell from a brief Wikipedia dive). The fictional elements dress up an already fascinating story with period details that bring the sights, sounds, and smells of late eighteenth century France back to life, all centered on the biography of a feisty young woman with a talent for recreating faces in wax.

After her father is permanently injured by an exploding canon during the Seven Years’ War, it seems like Marie’s life is destined to be macabre. Things get even more outré when her mother takes work with an anatomical artist named Curtius in Bern, Switzerland. Marie’s mother is horrified by Curtius’ work, but Marie is fascinated. During breaks between chores, she starts to teach her self to draw the body parts that are delivered to Curtius to be turned into wax models for medical students. The two rub along pretty well for a cadaverous doctor with no social skills and a girl with more curiosity than propriety. The two might have stayed in Bern forever if not for Curtius’ growing interest in casting people’s heads (to the great annoyance of his employer) and a visit from a French writer who tells them that there are better, most distinguished head in Paris.

Life is rough in Paris for Marie, or Little as she becomes known, but times are tough all over in the last fifteen years or so before the Bastille is stormed and the French Revolution kicks off. Before all that, Marie gets us an inside look at the hardscrabble world of lower class Paris entertainment as well as Versailles. The novel is full of Marie’s “sketches” of faces and facial features of the people she meets. Like Curtius, Marie is more interested in realism and uniqueness than anything else. In contrast to the artists Marie meets later, like Jacques-Louis David, she refuses to flatter and is not particularly interested in beauty. This fascination helped make the novel feel more real to me. After all, it’s set long before modern dermatology, medicine, and health insurance.

Little had me hooked right from the start. The characters, the setting, the history woven into the fiction, Marie’s grit in the face of being constantly treated with scorn because of her servant status—it was all catnip for me. Readers who relish sensory detail (smelly or otherwise) in historical fiction or who like reading about off-beat history will enjoy Little a lot. Like me, I suspect this book will send other readers to the internet to find out more about the amazing Madame Tussaud.