Title: Church of Marvels Author: Leslie Parry
Published: May 5, 2015
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 308
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads: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.
Leslie Parry’s Church of Marvels is a slow, twisting tale of outcasts and coincidences, weaving together the lives of four people into one story, set in turn-of-the-century New York City. It’s a unique novel, one that I really enjoyed. The author was able to surprise me in a few areas even while I completely guessed other plot twists, which was something I liked—here I thought I had everything figured out, but I really didn’t. I think that my biggest disappointment regarding Church of Marvels was how much better it could have been, had the author not relied so heavily on info-dumping and summary/exposition rather than dramatized scenes.
This book definitely got off to a slow start. I’d say the first 100 pages or so is just Parry setting the scene, establishing the characters and providing background information. Honestly, I didn’t much like Church of Marvels in the first part (out of three). It dragged and the constant flashbacks added extra, unnecessary weight. The three “main” perspectives are Sylvan, Odile, and Alphie, and the fourth unnamed and voiceless protagonist is the one who brings them all together. Obviously, with so many seemingly unconnected characters, the author needed to take the time to establish who they were and where they came from, but it seems to me that she could have been quicker about it. Every time the text reverted to flashback I grew frustrated.
However, by the beginning of part two, I as a reader was much more engaged. I’d figured out how all of these people were related and what the “mystery” they were going to uncover was. The story, after that point, became much more interesting. Church of Marvels is very much a book about fate, coincidence, and the interconnectedness. As a reader, you know the protagonists’ lives are intertwined and that they have to be unraveled, but you’re not quite sure how it’s going to happen. Watching this happen is what makes the book compelling.
At the same time, I was put out by Parry’s method of storytelling. Which relied very heavily on the epilogue, in which a protagonist just sits down and categorically answers all of the unanswered questions. That’s a very heavy-handed way of dealing with things, to my mind, and I would much rather the author have revealed things naturally over the course of the plot. This, combined with the author’s tendency to summarize events rather than show them in real time, was the major weakness of Church of Marvels. It’s an absolutely brilliant, engrossing story, but the author’s delivery wasn’t as strong as it could have been.
For a first novel, I think Church of Marvels shows a lot of promise. Leslie Parry’s creativity and imagination, her plot construction, are superb. Her craft will catch up in time. But either way, Church of Marvels is a dark, involved novel about misfits and chance circumstance.
