Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

Though he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski's ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its own way of death. The world...

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices plastered on lampposts. It is simply there. Within these nocturnal black-and-white-striped tents awaits an utterly unique experience, a feast for the senses. Beyond the smoke and mirrors, however, a fierce competition is under way, a contest between two young illusionists.

For the boy, it was the first real chance for a future. For the man, it was one last chance to triumph over his past. Opportunities like these happen only once in a Blue Moon.

"An absolute charmer."—Library Journal Starred Review

"Simply put, this is a ripsnorting good historical yarn full of circus lore, so smartly told by an expert storyteller that it's the kind of book truly deserving that overused term 'page-turner.'"—Chicago

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A vivid, daring novel about the devastating power of family secrets--beginning in the poignant, lurid world of a Depression-era traveling circus and coming full circle in the transformative 1950s. On a summer evening in 1931, Lilly Blackwood glimpses circus lights from the grimy window of her attic bedroom. Lilly isn't allowed to explore the meadows around Blackwood Manor. She's never even ventured beyond her narrow room. Momma insists it's for Lilly's...

Meridon, a vagabond gypsy, allows her vague memories of a very different life, as well as the necklace that is her birthright, to lead her home to Wideacre where she takes her place as its mistress.

"Nightmare Alley "begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek--alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd's gleeful disgust and derision--going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There's no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak...

She was only two feet, eight inches tall, but her legend reaches out to us more than a century later. As a child, Mercy Lavinia "Vinnie" Bump was encouraged to live a life hidden away from the public. Instead, she reached out to the immortal impresario P.T. Barnum and married tiny superstar General Tom Thumb in the wedding of the century. A fictionalized account of the Gilded Age and a woman's public triumphs and personal tragedies, this is the...

Includes index and bibliography

"In 1911, Mabel MacGinnis is Europe's strongest woman and has performed beside her father in the Manzo Brothers Circus her entire life. But at his unexpected death, she loses everything she's ever known and sets off in the company of acrobat Jake Cunningham for America in hope of finding the mother she's just discovered is still alive. Isabella Moreau, the nation's most feted aerialist, has given everything to the circus. But age and injury now threaten...

"The story of a girl, scorned for her physical deformity, whose passion and salvation lie in her otherworldly ability to transform herself and the world around her"--Amazon.com.