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Summary
Summary
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.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Like the late-19th-century circus attraction of its title, Parry's impressive debut is startling, full of wonders, and built around the bizarre; furthermore, it has compassion for human difference at its heart. The teenage Church sisters, sword-swallower Belle and her sickly twin, Odile, are left alone when their mother dies in a fire that destroys her business, Coney Island's Church of Marvels. After the tragedy, Belle disappears with no explanation other than an enigmatic letter. Meanwhile, cesspit cleaner Sylvan Threadgill saves a baby he finds half-buried in the soil of a privy, and a young woman known only as Alphie awakens as she is being committed to a brutal insane asylum. Odile seeks Belle, Sylvan hunts for the mother of the child, and Alphie fights fiercely for her freedom; along the way, their disparate stories begin to converge. Alphie and Belle meet, for example, while a mysterious Mrs. Bloodworth figures in all of their journeys. As they encounter one another, the secrets each one hides are revealed. Parry vividly brings her characters to life and captures the underbelly of 1895 New York-a place of baby sellers, opium dens, and brothels where what is painful and what is profitable merge. Her novel satisfies as a complex historical fiction, a compelling mystery, and an insightful exploration of such themes as otherness and outsider identity. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In Parry's colorful debut novel, seedy corners of late 19th-century New York come aliveand no one is exactly who they seem to be. Odile and Isabelle Church are mourning Coney Island's famous Church of Marvels, a theater and sideshow act that has recently burned to the ground with their mother inside. Both girls had been performers, but after the fire, Isabelle disappears into shadowy Manhattan. When Odile receives an alarming letter from her sister, she plunges into the city, determined to save her and bring her home. Along the way she encounters Sylvan the Dogboy, a bare-knuckle boxer who has recently discovered an abandoned baby in a privy; Mrs. Bloodworth, who helps pregnant girls arrange adoptions under the table; and a group of children at the underground gambling parlor the Frog and Toe who know more about her sister's fate than she does. At the same time that Odile's search unfolds, the book also follows Alphie, who has woken up at the Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island and must try to remember the circumstances that led her to be committed to that place of abuse and humiliation. Parry's writing is smooth and descriptive, and she imbues these misfit characters and shabby, sometimes horrifying settings with energy and depth. But the search that drives the story loses steam about halfway through the book; by cutting back and forth between several different narratives, Parry makes it harder for the reader to connect with these flawed, injured characters until there's a great revelation that brings all the stories together. This surprise revitalizes the novel but also makes its shortcomings more apparent. Beautifully written, Parry's imaginative novel is most successful when exploring the limitations and complexities of gender and sexuality during its historical period. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Life is uncommon and strange; it is full of intricacies and odd, confounding turns. This statement made by the opening narrator of Parry's creative debut also describes its characters and story line, which bursts with extraordinary, Dickensian-style details of 1895 New York. Amid the city's grimy waterfronts, opium dens, and other lowlife regions, four impoverished misfits pursue separate missions. The discovery of a newborn baby in the privies outside a tenement prompts Sylvan Threadgill to locate the child's mother, while Odile Church leaves Coney Island to find her sister, Belle, her sideshow partner before fire killed their courageous mother and destroyed their circus. Lastly, young Alphie waits for her undertaker husband to rescue her from an asylum. Their stories twine together in ways that feel surprising when first encountered but were actually carefully planted from the start. Emphasizing the plight of women, orphans, and society's nonconforming outcasts, the setting is superbly showcased, with its medley of sights and smells both wretched and wondrous. Especially recommended for admirers of atmospheric nineteenth-century historicals like Emma Donoghue's Frog Music (2014).--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LESLIE PARRY'S debut novel opens with a strange discovery: Sylvan, an isolated young man living on the Lower East Side of 1890s Manhattan, finds an infant abandoned in a privy. Sylvan is a night-soiler - if you're unfamiliar with the profession, imagine the worst possible sanitation job that a person could hold before the age of indoor plumbing - and until he finds the baby, he's had very little in the way of direction or hope. The family who raised him have all died of TB. Meanwhile, on the distant shore of Coney Island, Odile is struggling to survive a double loss. She was raised in a circus, always in the shadow of her more talented twin sister, Belle. But the circus recently burned to the ground, killing their mother and the circus tigers, and Belle has disappeared into Manhattan. And on the sliver of land that's now Roosevelt Island, another young woman, Alphie, is waking into the nightmare of an insane asylum. She isn't insane. The reason for her confinement is not immediately obvious. These stories are, of course, closely linked: A shadowy transaction has taken place, and these people are caught up in the aftermath. But beyond the mechanics of the plot, the major characters - Odile, Sylvan and Alphie - share a common longing for home. They struggle, in various ways, to find some sense of belonging in the world. Odile had a home and a family, but that's gone now; Alphie thought she'd found stability in marriage, but the days slip past in the asylum and still her husband doesn't come for her; Sylvan finds peace only in violence, in public fights where he competes for the purse. The fights offer both solace and an outlet for rage. Parry excels in character development. Her novel is a fascinating study in alienation, set in a time when Manhattan, at least from a distance, seemed like the promised land. Not long after the book opens, Odile sets out in search of her sister and sees Manhattan for the first time: "The buildings and smokestacks were gilded in the light; they seemed to rise from the water like the masts of a sunken ship." But a sunken ship implies depths, and a strength of Parry's novel is her willingness to look directly into the shadows. This is an unvarnished vision of the 19th century, the Gilded Age by way of Quentin Tarantino: A boy wears a paper cone in lieu of a nose, a tongueless woman in the asylum has been fitted with a metal mask, and drugged child prostitutes mill about by the waterfront. The novel's few discordant notes are the kind of errors that most writers make in their earliest works. Parry sometimes leans too heavily on the withholding of information as a means of setting up dramatic developments; a third-act revelation concerning the identity of a major character will strike some readers as manipulative. The beginning of the book is weighted down by a wholly unnecessary prologue, and it is difficult to square the narrator of the prologue with the narrator of the epilogue, in tone and in outlook, although they are in fact the same character. There are a few awkward moments in the prose, mainly having to do with ascribing motive and emotion to inanimate things - a drip of sweat that "panicked" before it fell off the tip of a nose, light that was "taunting" as it was reflected into an eye. But these missteps are minor, the writing is often exquisite and Parry's imagery is breathtaking - I am unable to shake one indelible image of tigers galloping silently into the sea, on fire, "their great legs springing through the sand, cloaks of flame rising from their backs." EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL'S most recent novel, "Station Eleven," was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Library Journal Review
[DEBUT] In Parry's well-drawn vision of 19th-century New York City, anyone finding themselves on the wrong side of "us versus them" is made to feel as if their whole existence is fit only for a sideshow. A young orphan struggles to work his way out of the muck and back-alley boxing matches, a woman searches for her runaway contortionist sister, and Alphie, a secretive young bride, wakes up in an insane asylum. Home is a nebulous concept for these characters, but their drive to find and make it real will expose them to challenges they could never have imagined. Verdict Parry's debut novel infuses life into the seamy corners of the city, taking readers to riverside bars, opium dens, and the bedlam of Blackwell's Island. Each narrative has its merits, but it is Alphie's tale that will resonate with readers long after they finish the book. Her bewilderment at her imprisonment and treatment is heartrending, as is her fervent belief that her husband will come to her rescue. Historical fiction fans in search of unusual perspectives will find a lot here to enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]-Liza Oldham, Beverly, MA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
