THEATRE OF MARVELS

A young actor in Victorian-era London is determined to save an African woman from an evil theater owner.

Twenty-year-old Zillah, the narrator of Dillsworth’s debut novel, has far from a charmed life, but she’s come a long way from “the slums of St. Giles,” the London neighborhood where she was raised. Or has she? The young woman, the child of a Black mother and White father, has an acting gig, but it’s a pretty bad one: She plays the “Great Amazonia,” “a dangerous savage from darkest Africa,” at a theater company run by a leering creep named Marcus Crillick. (Both Zillah and Crillick know the Amazon isn’t in Africa, but they assume, correctly, that their audiences won’t care.) Zillah has been living with her lover, Crillick’s friend the aristocrat Vincent Woodward, at Crillick’s house. Zillah sees Vincent as her ticket out of the theater, but things get complicated when she meets Lucien Winters, a Black grocer who loathes Zillah’s act and wants to “save” her from it. Zillah manages to withstand the humiliation she feels when she performs in blackface (Crillick thinks she’s “not Black enough” as it is to play Amazonia), but when the theater owner introduces a new act to his patrons, a terrified African woman he calls the “Leopard Lady,” Zillah despairs for the newcomer’s safety, suspecting she’s been kidnapped. Zillah becomes determined to save the woman, knowing that it will mean the end of her career at the theater; meanwhile, she learns an unwelcome secret about Vincent’s family. With the exception of Zillah, all the characters are flat archetypes—Crillick is cartoonishly evil; Vincent and Lucien are both bland though are apparently meant to be charming. While Dillsworth does a decent job of evoking Victorian London and her pacing isn’t terrible, readers will see the plot twists, such as they are, coming a mile (kilometre?) away. Dillsworth shows some promise, but this novel never manages to rise above the level of unremarkable.

Nothing to marvel at.