Last Stop Klindenspiel: A Dark Circus in Post World War II Poland

I'm always up for a circus novel.  That's why I downloaded Last Stop Klindenspiel from Amazon.  The last circus fiction I reviewed here on Book Babe was the YA paranormal romantic circus novel Girl on a Wire.  You can find that review here .  Last Stop Klindenspiel by Marta Tandori is very different in tone.  It's supposed to be a historical prequel to what looks to me like a contemporary Los Angeles noir  mystery series.  I haven't read the series, but the Kindle edition of Last Stop Klindenspiel contains several excerpts from the Kate Stanton series.  In the series timeline it is  established that Kate Stanton was once Katya Holberg.  I don't know how fans of the Kate Stanton series react to the revelations in this novel, but I found that the prequel stands very much on its own.

                                                         

My identification with Katya made this a tough read because she experienced so many traumatic events during and after World War II.  I had to take frequent breaks from the book in order to cope with its raw intensity.

 Many readers will not have heard of the Nazi Project Lebensborn.   This was as effort to increase the number of  so called "pure Aryan" children.   The term Aryan originally referred to a linguistic group, not a race. Katya was brought into the world as part of the Lebensborn Project.  Her father, a self-absorbed Nazi officer, had a sexual relationship with Sonia Holberg, a Norwegian woman who became Katya's mother.  After World War II the women who participated in Lebensborn suffered in the backlash against anyone associated with the Nazis, and so did their children.  Before reading Tandori's novel,  I was aware of the Lebensborn children, but had no real awareness of their post-war persecution.   This is an aspect of the post-war environment that should be more widely known.

The circus Klindenspiel was supposed to be a haven for Katya.  She would be able to exhibit the skills as a contortionist that she had learned from her mother.  Yet the young performers at Klindenspiel  were submerged in a miasma of fear and antagonism toward their superiors and each other.  Katya wanted to understand why there was so much negativity.   She idealistically wanted to improve the lives of everyone at Klindenspiel, and she received unexpected support from some very unlikely sources.

If you are looking for circus lore or vocabulary, you won't find that sort of thing in Last Stop Klindenspiel , but you will find some very realistic descriptions of training and choreography for acrobatic routines.  The vocabulary seems to originate from the world of gymnastics, and I have some familiarity with it.

What I appreciated about this book was the history, the character relationships, the suspense, the surprising plot twists  and the imaginative concept.  Marta Tandori did everything right in this book.

I'm still mystified about how Katya Holberg eventually became Kate Stanton, but I was completely satisfied by the resolution of this particular chapter in her life. 

                                                       

                                                                                  

Girl on a Wire: Magic, Bravery, Romance and Rivalry in the Circus World

I bought Girl on a Wire by Gwenda Bond as a Kindle First pre-release book and resolved to read it as soon as I had a little bit of breathing space between the R2Rs (Read To Review)and the blog tours.  I love circus novels. Girl on a Wire is a really wonderful example of circus fiction if you like daring stunts and have a taste for the paranormal.  If you were like me, and found The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern  both inauthentic and superficial, then this book may be the magical circus experience that you were seeking.

                                                

                                  

 

The sixteen year old central character Julietta Maroni, who calls herself Jules, is a wire walker.  They are often called tightrope performers, but they walk on a wire.  Once they did use rope.  According to an article on The Oxford Dictionaries Blog, the first recorded reference to a “walker on ropes” occurred in 1542. I would tend to believe that performers eventually transitioned to wire because it’s more durable.  This circus skill is difficult enough to master without also having to deal with the possibility of a fraying rope.  

Jules has a role model in her discipline who actually existed.  Her name was Bird Millman who was a highwire artist with Barnum & Bailey.  She was best known for her grace and fearlessness.  Since a picture is worth a thousand words, this video on the Two Nerdy History Girls blog which documents a Bird Millman performance in 1931 ought to be worth at least ten thousand words.  I would love to read a biography or historical novel dealing with the life of this woman.

I enjoyed the circus traditions and vocabulary included in this novel.  The magical element occurs in the context of centuries old beliefs.  In circus families luck has always been considered an important factor in the success of an act, and losing that luck was often historically ascribed to a curse.

The two rival families that are the central focus of Girl on a Wire are the Maronis whose leading members are wire walkers, and the Garcias who star on the flying trapeze.  The commonality between these circus events is that they are both performed in midair.  This is why their practitioners are collectively known as aerealists.  I have always been a huge fan of the flying trapeze, but I came to appreciate the skill involved in walking that wire as a result of reading this book.  Wire walkers and trapeze artists are both risk takers who rely heavily on precision, timing and luck.   Despite these shared attributes, the Maronis and Garcias have not been allies.  Instead there is a legacy of hatred between these two circus dynasties that is rooted in the past.

 Jules wants to uncover the reasons behind the enmity between the Maroni and Garcia clans; especially after she meets a charismatic male performer of her own generation whose surname is Garcia.    Other reviews have called the Romeo and Juliet aspect of this novel predictable.  I prefer to call it archetypal. It’s also important to note that the resolution of this story is far from predictable.   I found it rather ingenious.  Shakespeare would never have envisioned it.   I expect to count this book among my top reads of 2014.

                                           

From Battered Bride to Courageous Circus Teacher...The Language of Silence by Peggy Webb

This is an inspiring tale, a story so engrossing that I if I hadn't had to work, if everyday life would have just let me be, I'd have read this book in a day. I didn't want to put it down.

There are two wonderful heroines in this. I absolutely LOVED Ruth. She's a spunkier-than-all-get-out old lady whose home is in the Ozarks. She has visions and tries to interpret them and wants nothing more than to save her battered niece and find out what happened to her own sister Lola years ago.

"You ain't gonna find nothin' here but a skinny old woman with a tough hide. Now, git."

Ruth had never seen anything, man nor beast that she couldn't outsmart, outlast, and outfight if she tried.

"Give me enough skeins of yarn, and I can knit a slipcover for the Empire State Building."

And the niece, Ellen. She's beaten black and blue by her husband and her own mother doesn't even believe her, and when she attempts to go to a shelter, she finds herself back in his un-loving arms. What can she do? She has so much courage in what she does. As the story unfolds, we watch her, with Ruth's help, grow a backbone of steel, stand up for herself, and follow her dreams. I loved her in the end, absolutely loved her. I recommend all women read this book.

She would not be her mother, she would not be June Cleaver, and she'd be damned if she'd let a backwoods woman from Tremont, Mississippi, be her hero, no matter how many hit records Wynette had. 

But this is not just a battered-woman story, or even the story of a woman escaping. It's also about the circus family. It's about a special-ed teacher. It's about a woman in the past who worked with tigers. However, I wish there had been more of that stuff--a lot more. I feel Lola's story was not strong enough, nor was there enough of it, to really have any relevance to the modern story. And the circus family's acceptance of Ellen and Ruth--it was so sudden. I imagine some time went by, but how much? There's so little interaction with the people before suddenly she's one of the family. And as for her being a special-ed teacher, what and when does she actually teach? There's all of three scenes with her school kids and except for one reading session, they just seem to play and all of a sudden, a boy who couldn't speak is speaking.

I actually wish this book was longer so it could have expanded more on all those bits.

But I still really enjoyed this novel and its theme. Battered women need to have hope and this book delivers that.

I received this via Netgalley.

The Julius Romeros Extravaganza Part 1: The Bearded Girl by Hayley Lawson-Smith

A story both tragic and hilarious. This is going to be tough to explain...


Abigail is born with whiskers. She is treated horribly in the household. They shave her beard. Naturally, it brings "shame" to the family's' good name. The beard grows back. Her mother disappears, checking herself into a spa or something, leaving Abigail being raised by an evil housekeeper, the housekeeper's husband, and a nanny.

They hide her from society as long as they can. And when it begins to be difficult, they make the girl wear a veil. There's a fraudulent doctor and his leeches. There's a fat priest and a birdbath baptismal. There's a gypsy with a stinky concoction.

It's very sad, really, but the way this story is told...even the scathing things the housekeeper or her husband say at times...is utterly hilarious. This is something one will just have to read to see for themselves what I mean... BUT there's also some touching parts and parts that make one think.

Little Abigail grows up not seeing the rest of the world, so she doesn't know what is "normal." She believes she is. She puts beards on her dolls, ties ribbons in her whiskers. We only consider normal "normal" because people tell us what's normal. But really, who has the problem? The bearded girl or the way others look at her?

Real Bearded Lady Annie Jones

In the eyes of the beholder....hm?

When she's taken to a circus and handed over, we meet the snake charmer, the fat man, the twisted woman (both body and soul), the elephants, an albino elephant, Julius, a "mermaid", and enter the world of the traveling carnival. It's a family that takes care of each other and together, they make their own world. It's so much easier to survive with each other than face the hate of the world on their own. With the exception of twisted lady, everyone does their bit and then some. It's more touching scenes.

More food for thought.

The "ugliest" people can have the most beautiful of souls.

LOVED this book. I do have one quibble though and thus, I give a four-star rating instead of the five. Where the heck was the dad? When Abigail is born, he's away at war, lost in action. What war? What time period was this? I could not figure it out. At first I thought WWII, but then there was never any mentions of war on the homefront and this is, I believe, England. There is no rationing, no talk of the outside world at all in the novel. The father is gone...forever. When the girl is four, he's found and coming home, but then she's "sold". They say, "Oh, he'll never know she existed." When the man comes home, surely, even this evil housekeeper cannot expect that he won't hear one peep about the little girl his own sister met, about the daughter of his that attended school however briefly. In all of Abigail's life, her father never finds out she existed when she lived in house and hosted a family party in his own home?

Didn't buy that bit at all and some trouble with it. After she's been in public--even with a veil on--after she's fought with his own nephew, someone is bound to ask the man, "Where is Abigail?"

But...before I end this review, I leave you with a charming piece of humor from the book, so you can see just a touch of the humor found within its pages... And this line comes in a bit about the carnival packing to move to the next town. Seems the clowns can't stop juggling items long enough to pack them... What do you think the solution is? 

"And so it was, with more than just a small amount of smugness and great pleasure, that Old Barty put the marauding clowns onto manure-shovelling duty."

Four bikes. I downloaded this free from Amazon.