by Sarah Gruen

This was an amazing story.

I love realistic stories about the circus or carnivals and I learned from the author's note at the end that this was very well researched in a historian sense. It rang mostly true and some of the incidents were taken from events that really happened somewhere in circus history.

My only niggle is that it was written in present tense. I'm not going to dock it a star for that as I usually do because it was done well and sometimes I could forget to notice, but it still would have been better in past tense.

The depiction of the rough edges of depression era train circus life was very immersive and I actually read most of the book into the night because I didn't want to stop. That's a sign of a well written story!

Without giving anything away, I particularly liked the way it finished. I mean the story itself, before getting to the notes. The decision made by Jacob, the main protagonist, left me with a smile on my face. Characters were strong throughout the story, human or otherwise.

There were definitely some animal antics that made me laugh, especially the elephant. There were other emotions too, some not so pleasant, especially with the knowledge that animals weren't cared for as they should have been in those days, but it's far in the past now and I could enjoy the story as a nostalgic record of a time that happened long before I was born.

The book about Thailand is pretty nice.

Worst Riding School is more YA.

Laffe is wonderfully illustrated.  Mattie is great.  Felix is a bit weird.

This is a fascinating family history: the author, who was born an untouchable in India, writes primarily a biography of her uncle and her mother, focusing on their young lives. This family had hard lives, despite being better-educated than most people of their caste; even while working as college lecturers, they barely made enough to live on, lived in poor housing and dealt with a lot of family strife. Satyam, the oldest son, who gets most of the page time here, became a communist and spent most of his life fighting for that cause, while Manjula, the daughter of the family, collected several degrees before entering into an arranged marriage. They face a lot of struggles in their lives but never become the simple victims common in fiction; they are always moving forward, making their own decisions in life.

I’m a little surprised to see that many reviewers have struggled with this book; to me it seemed written in the standard style of popular nonfiction, straightforward but vivid. The story is presented from the perspectives of Satyam and Manjula, without spending much time filling readers in on the historical background or questioning the reliability of their memories (though interviews with others allow Gidla to fill in information they didn’t know at the time), but that’s standard for family memoirs. My biggest criticism is that it wraps up very abruptly at the end, briefly summarizing the next several decades; it was unclear to me why the author stopped where she did. The book is a good length overall, but I would have loved to read more about the author herself, especially after the glimpses of her life at the beginning and end. Definitely a book I would recommend to those interested in India, and in what life at the bottom is like from a firsthand perspective.

Along with Sleeping Murder and Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, I will be re-reading this collection of Christie mysteries. The Sittaford Mystery is especially appropriate, since I am snowed in today.

I am excited to revisit them!