I know this reply is a gazillion months late, but I came here looking for something else, and saw this comment had been added.
Telling fortunes with molten lead: it's a thing! It's called molybdomancy.
A lot of things about this story don't work, but the timeline actually does, at least in that respect. Jessica dies in 1950. I don't think we have an exact birthdate for her, but her son Frederick was born circa 1900, so she was probably born in the early 1880s. That means she would be in her late 60s when she died.
Frederick specifically mentions that it was just after WWII when the toy industry turned toward the use of plastic, and that does align with real world history: Fisher Price released its entire toy line in plastic in the late 1940s. It's in 1950 that he's incredibly bitter about it and creates the cupboard.
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Date: 2019-11-30 02:06 am (UTC)Telling fortunes with molten lead: it's a thing! It's called molybdomancy.
A lot of things about this story don't work, but the timeline actually does, at least in that respect. Jessica dies in 1950. I don't think we have an exact birthdate for her, but her son Frederick was born circa 1900, so she was probably born in the early 1880s. That means she would be in her late 60s when she died.
Frederick specifically mentions that it was just after WWII when the toy industry turned toward the use of plastic, and that does align with real world history: Fisher Price released its entire toy line in plastic in the late 1940s. It's in 1950 that he's incredibly bitter about it and creates the cupboard.