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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.… (more)
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This is a well-crafted story. Although it is Parry's debut, I felt as though I was in the hands of a pro. Perhaps because of the subject matter, it reminded me a bit of [The Night Circus], but it also has elements of a good mystery. I'm glad I read this one!
Alphie was married to Anthony until one morning she wakes up in an insane asylum. Alphie keeps waiting for Anthony to show up and rescue her. When he does not show up, Alphie sets out to escape and gets help from Belle. Belle ended up in the asylum the same night as Alphie. At first Alphie does not remember how she ended up there and her story (along with Belle’s) is slowly revealed throughout the book.
Odile starts looking for her sister and runs into Sylvan Threadgill. Sylvan helps Odile look for Belle. The Church of Marvels is a very strange book. I do not want to give anything away (spoilers), so I have tried to keep my summary brief (for me at least). We get to find out about life for the people that are different in 1895 New York (people born with deformities, work as actors, work in circus acts, girls that end up unwed and pregnant). I give Church of Marvels 2.5 out of 5 stars. I just did not enjoy this book. It lacks a nice flow. It is disjointed and confusing. Everything makes sense at the end of the book, but it is a long trip to get to that point.
I received a complimentary copy of Church of Marvels from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The review and opinions expressed are my own.
The characters though are amazing, full of depth, flawed and anguished, searching for a better life. Capable of great kindness and a great capacity for love. The twists, seriously did not expect most of them, couldn't have guessed for all the money. They kept coming, especially in the last third of the book, and I was amazed at the author who put this all together. Totally different from any other book I have read.
A very good read, though dark, be warned and some of the things are not easy to hear or read, though not horribly graphic. Found it memorable and am very glad to have read it.
-Sylvan, a night-soiler,
-Odile who was raised in a circus called the Church of Marvels on Coney Island. Thanks to a physical handicap, she has always lived in the shadow of her twin sister Belle who is a sword-swallower and a shapeshifter. But when the circus is burned down, killing her mother and several of the performers, Belle disappears and Odile follows the only clue she has to the slums of Manhattan.
-Alphie who was thrown out by her strict religious father at the age of twelve for kissing a boy. She was forced into prostitution but found a job doing concealing makeup for men on the way home after a night of drinking, drugging, and brawling. She met Anthony, an opium smoker and undertaker, who, despite his mother’s protests, marries her. But Alphie has secrets that, when discovered, will have devastating effects for her.
These may be the main characters but Parry has created a huge cast of characters who are often outcasts due to no fault of their own living lives at the edge of proper society but who are all complex, diverse, and fascinating – even the villain of the piece has shades of grey that make the reader, if not empathize, at least understand.
Parry’s Church of Marvels is a beautifully written novel, haunting and memorable. It is both very colourful and exceedingly dark, full of wonders and tragedies but in the end, a very satisfying read.
Leaving behind her twin sister, Isabelle Church fled to Manhattan in the wake of the Coney Island fire that
"I haven’t been able to speak since I was seventeen years old. Some people believed that because of this I’d be able to keep a secret. They believed I could hear all manners of tales and confessions and repeat nothing. Perhaps they believe that if I cannot speak, I cannot listen or remember or even think for myself – that I am, in essence, invisible. That I will stay silent forever. I’m afraid they are mistaken."
With her mother dead, and her twin sister gone, only Odile Church remains at Coney Island, the spinning girl on the Wheel of Death. When a letter from her sister finally arrives she heads to Manhattan, determined to find her.
"At first glance the twins looked alike - they were both freckled and hazel eyed, with thick blonde hair and the snub nose of a second-rate chorus girl. But that was where the similarities ended, Unlike Belle, with her lithe and pliant acrobat's body, Odile had a permanent crook in her neck and a slight curve to her spine."
Sylvan Threadgill is nineteen, abandoned as a young child, he makes his living as a night-soiler, and boxes for a few extra pennies. One night he finds a baby girl half drowned in the effluent and rescues her.
"Under their breaths they called him Dogboy. He'd been puzzled over and picked apart all of his life - the skin of a Gypsy, the hair of a Negro, the build of a German, the nose of a Jew. he didn't belong to anyone. They started at him with a kind of terrified wonder, as though he was a curiosity in a dime museum. One of his eyes was brown, so dark it nearly swallowed the pupil, and the other pale, aqueous blue."
When Alphie Leonetti, once a 'penny rembrandt', is first introduced she is waiting for her husband, Anthony, to rescue her from the notorious Blackwell's Asylum in the East River, the last thing she remembers is an argument with her disapproving mother in law. Desperate to escape she befriends a mute inmate with startling skills.
"Alphie curled up and covered her face with her hair, then cried her voice away. She couldn't bear it; she'd come so far from her days a s a girl on the street, a bony runaway with shoes made from paper, waiting there on the corner with her paint stand and jars. And here she was, through some cruel reversal, sent back to the anonymous hive, trapped in a room full of women who were not missed and not wanted, who would wear the same dress every day until it disintegrated on their hungry frames-a dress she too wore, formless and smelling of some previous disease..."
With evocative phrasing Parry creates memorable characters and vivid settings, from the seedy shores of Coney Island to the dark, narrow streets of inner Manhattan, and the bleak horror of the asylum marooned in the middle of the East River.
A novel that demands attention, the lyrical prose of Church of Marvels tells a complex, suspenseful mystery that sometimes appears scattered, but is eventually brought to a stunning resolution.
"We can be a weary, cynical lot – we grow old and see only what suits us, and what is marvelous can often pass us by. A kitchen knife. A bulb of glass. A human body. That something so common should be so surprising – why, we forget it. We take it for granted. We assume that our sight is reliable, that our deeds are straightforward, that our words have one meaning. But life is uncommon and strange; it is full of intricacies and odd, confounding turns."
The setting is New York, NY
A baby is found by a young man who cleans toilets. The baby, is covered with excrement.
The man who found the baby takes us through the back alleys of opium and prostitution.
A woman is institutionalized and wants to find her baby. Her surroundings are tattered, dirty and filled with women guards who tie hands and feet and spit at faces.
A carney whose mother owned the operation seeks to find what happened to her twin sister. Aware of a fire that destroyed the Church of Marvels, she knows her mother died in the ashes. Endlessly roaming with memories of the Coney Island seashore, she strives to find the other half of her soul.
All three eventually come together, but it takes a long, long time to get to the conclusion.
One little star for a debut book written by an author who might try describing a tad of sunshine now and again.
Odile and Belle are the twins daughters of the mother who started the Church of Marvels, a Coney Island sideshow. And they are
After a mysterious letter arrives for Odile, she goes in search of her sister, unsure of what she will find. At the same time, Sylvan - a nightsoiler - finds a baby girl from a privvy he is cleaning out. The infant appears dead but revives after a few minutes. Unable to simply drop her at an orphanage, he sneaks her home and starts the search for her family, certain that no mother could abandon a baby like that.
What follows is a surprising action-packed adventure. The pacing in this book is perfect. And the characters are fully developed individuals with their own unique perspectives on what is happening in their lives. Parry doesn't shy away from difficult subjects and approaches them with a clear and authentic voice. The intertwining of narratives and the interconnectedness of the plotlines are brought together masterfully in the finale.
The only weakness in this novel is its dark tone. This is not a happily-ever-after, feel good novel. But that's what makes it so real.
Highly recommended!
Alphie's last chapter felt a little too pat, though I'm happy she was landing on her feet. I guess her story is one of arriving at
Belle's chapter at the end felt unnecessary. She was this somewhat inscrutable ghost throughout most the book, but you still got a sense of her as a person. You could infer a lot of things that happened, and others just didn't seem so important to learn about -- better for them to have remained vaguely half-imagined than explicitly spelled out. The curtain was pulled back a little too far, I guess.
There was also the Dickensian pile-up of acquaintances and paths crossed...but I don't hold this against the book.
It was a good read for the most part; it
The secondary characters are excellent. I DARE you to tell me you wouldn’t be terrified if you met the Signora in a dark alley. Though she is dead before the book begins, the mother of Odile and her sister Belle, Friendship Willingbird Church, is in the running for biggest badass in literature (also best name). Case in point:
“My mother was fearsome and beautiful, the impresario of the sideshow; she brought me and my sister up on sawdust, greasepaint, and applause. Her name—known throughout the music halls and traveling tent shows of America—was Friendship Willingbird Church. She was born to a clan of miners in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but ran away from home when her older brother was killed at Antietam. She cut off her hair, joined the infantry, and saw her first battle at the age of fourteen. In the tent at night, she buried her face in the gunnysack pillow and wept bitterly thinking of him, hungry for revenge.”
There are more plot twists than you can shake a stick at. This is basically the modern, feminist version of Dickens; I kept thinking of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, though that’s not really a perfect comparison. One of the characters collects teeth. TEETH. That’s straight-up a page out of Miss Havisham’s book. At a certain point, you’ll get to a major plot twist and everything will make so much more sense. There were several plot twists which made me re-read the paragraph multiple times because I was thinking, “Fuck, does that mean what I think it means? Wait, really? How did I miss that???”
Most of the novel takes place in the seedy underbelly of turn-of-the-century NYC (thank CHRIST b/c I’m really tired of hearing about rich people, Downton Abbey), but all of it is described with completely lovely prose.
It’s seriously been AT LEAST a year since I’ve read a book I liked this much, the last one I can recall being Octavia Butler’s Kindred (don’t talk to me about Fledgling, though). There’s some fantastic exploration of identity and disguises and healing. I loved the prose, found the characters intriguing, and kept turning the pages to discover the next twist. A great read, in my opinion.
This was written so well. Small tie-ins with each
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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 and Belle is missing. 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. As these strangers’ lives become increasingly connected, their stories and secrets unfold.
It's slow and lyrical but unfortunately I wasn't particularly gripped.