#31 Reading

I picked this book up to read on our August trip to New York, and never ended up getting to it, so I tried it again last week. It's not a book I would normally choose for myself--I usually lean towards mysteries rather than bestsellers. (I particularly avoid bestsellers with the word "romantic" in the description.) But, it had good reviews, and I ended up liking it quite a bit. The main character is a 93-year-old man who is thinking back seventy years to the time he joined the circus as a vet during the Depression. His stories about circus life and the time period really held my interest, even though some of the descriptions of his romantic interludes were pretty cheesy. The book has an interview with the author & book club discussion questions at the end, but I can't see myself recommending it to my book club because I don't think the story lends itself to a lot of discussion. Still, I enjoy a well-told story.

Here's the book description from Publisher's Weekly:

The novel, told in flashback by nonagenarian Jacob Jankowski, recounts the wild and wonderful period he spent with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a traveling circus he joined during the Great Depression. When 23-year-old Jankowski learns that his parents have been killed in a car crash, leaving him penniless, he drops out of Cornell veterinary school and parlays his expertise with animals into a job with the circus, where he cares for a menagerie of exotic creatures. He also falls in love with Marlena, one of the show's star performers—a romance complicated by Marlena's husband, the unbalanced, sadistic circus boss who beats both his wife and the animals Jankowski cares for. Despite her often clichéd prose and the predictability of the story's ending, Gruen skillfully humanizes the midgets, drunks, rubes and freaks who populate her book.