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Here's my review for the July theme. Church of Marvels Leslie Parry 2015 ISBN: 978-0-06-236755-6 319 print pages This is a debut novel by Leslie Parry. Set in New York in the late 1800s , the story is about twin sisters Odile and Belle, whose mother runs a sideshow in Coney Island; Sylvan, who is employed as a night soiler (which is exactly what you think it might be: these men collected human waste that was in buckets outside of homes during the night) and Alphie, the wife of an undertaker. Other than the twins, these four have no reason to ever know each other. None of their lives, with the exception of Odile's, is as it appears to be on the surface. From disparate beginnings and current circumstances, the four characters’ lives intertwine in a shocking chain of events. The author writes wonderfully, as in the following passage: "His early life, he thought, was like the slow flip of photographs: the images were too sparse and sporadic to make any sense together, but each so vivid that whenever one flickered to his mind, he was startled by its intensity. How could certain visions like these remain so luminous, and yet he had no recollection at all of what had come before or after? A whip-scarred pony, neighing in a leaky stable. A band of red-haired children chasing him down the riverbank, pelting him with rocks. Sleeping in a pile of damp, foul hay. Sleeping in a cedar box on the waterfront. The wood of that box, unpainted and cotton-soft under his cheek, and the sticky sap that dripped from it like a wound. (Mrs. Scarlatta later told him those were the paupers’ coffins, waiting to be filled and taken over the river.)" The story goes back and forth between the characters and in time. It's dark. Twisted. Beautiful in sparse glimpses. And ultimately haunting. It's the writing that makes this book readable and recommendable. The subject matter is often grisly and despairing: abject poverty, children treated too poorly to even mention here, opium dens, whorehouses and etc. I have no reason to think that life was not really like this back then. I'm just glad I wasn't there.    |
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