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Book Reviewed by:A ravishing first novel, set in vibrant, tumultuous turn-of-the-century New York City, where the lives of four outsiders become entwined, bringing irrevocable change to them all.
New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs.
Odile Church and her beautiful sister, Belle, were raised amid the applause and magical pageantry of The Church of Marvels, their mother's spectacular Coney Island sideshow. But the Church has burnt to the ground, their mother dead in its ashes. Now Belle, the family's star, has vanished into the bowels of Manhattan, leaving Odile alone and desperate to find her.
A young woman named Alphie awakens to find herself trapped across the river in Blackwell's Lunatic Asylum - sure that her imprisonment is a ruse by her husband's vile, overbearing mother. On the ward she meets another young woman of ethereal beauty who does not speak, a girl with an extraordinary talent that might save them both.
As these strangers' lives become increasingly connected, their stories and secrets unfold. Moving from the Coney Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East Side, a spectacular human circus to a brutal, terrifying asylum, Church of Marvels takes readers back to turn-of-the-century New York - a city of hardship and dreams, love and loneliness, hope and danger. In magnetic, luminous prose, Leslie Parry offers a richly atmospheric vision of the past in a narrative of astonishing beauty, full of wondrous enchantments, a marvelous debut that will leave readers breathless.
For as impressive as I found the plotting and language, I was slightly unsatisfied with the characterization. Because the story is divided between three sets of characters, I felt I never got to know some of the main figures, especially Odile, as well as I might like. The kitchen-sink approach to the plot means Parry has to spend a lot of time tying up loose ends, whereas if there were fewer characters and subplots she could have focused on exploring them more deeply. Nevertheless, this is a very atmospheric and accomplished debut novel. Circus and sideshow themes have been very popular in fiction in recent years, and this is a great example of a novel that uses those elements as background but goes beyond the incidentals of the carnival lifestyle to examine sexuality and societal outcasts...continued
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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Coney Island, Brooklyn has long been known as a seaside vacation destination. As early as the 1830s, it was a retreat for New York City workers, and its attraction grew as it became more accessible by train, streetcar, and steamboat. Between the 1880s and World War II, Coney Island was the nation's foremost leisure area, with three large amusement parks in competition with each other, plus numerous smaller attractions.
Steeplechase Park, the first of Coney Island's major establishments, opened in 1897, followed by Luna Park in 1903 and Dreamland in 1904. All three parks suffered devastating fires (as did Phineas T. Barnum's American Museum in the 1860s), so the demise of the titular theater in Leslie Parry's Church of Marvels is ...
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