A sometimes-engrossing but overlong memoir about carnival life and family bonds.
A writer performs in a traveling sideshow tour after spending three years with her mother as she endured a series of debilitating strokes.
In her debut memoir, Fontaine explores the power of the mother-daughter bond and the resiliency and marvel of the human body under duress. In October 2010, the author’s mother suffered the first of several strokes. She was left severely incapacitated and in the care of her husband, Fontaine’s stepfather. Yet in the summer of 2013, at great risk to her health, they set off together for an ambitious trip to Italy, refusing to give in to her physical limitations. On a whim, the author set off on her own adventure, signing on as a carnival performer in America’s last traveling sideshow, the World of Wonders. For the next 150 days, she tested her physical endurance and deeply ingrained fears, acquiring skills as a fire eater, snake charmer, and escape artist, among other sideshow feats, and investigating the unique culture and often grueling realities of carnival life. Fontaine is a graceful writer, and her story initially shows great promise as she seamlessly weaves together a chronicle of her often bizarre carnival experiences with poignant memories of her mother before and after her illness. But as the narrative segues into a lengthy day-to-day account of her experiences on the tour, it becomes less urgently involved with her connection to her mother and reads more like a journalistic reporting exercise. Though the author is careful to recount her dedicated immersion within this world, there’s an emotional detachment that grows more evident in her encounters with the individuals who inhabit this space. After several weeks on the tour, as the wonders begin to grow thin and somewhat repetitive, the story loses momentum. Though her tale eventually leads to a moving and satisfying conclusion, the journey is unnecessarily arduous.
A sometimes-engrossing but overlong memoir about carnival life and family bonds.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-15837-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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