Customer Reviews

Cirkus: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The characters of this book are the side-show "freaks" in a circus traveling though the midwest of 1900 America. Patti Frazee has shown us that our wishes, dreams, problems, tradegies, make us all the same.
Cojoined twins love different men, disapprove of one-anothers choices. What sisters haven't?
Shanghai the dwarf, has a terrible childhood and carries a burdensome secret. Which of us doesn't have a tale of woe?
Mariana and her husband Jacob are living through betrayal and loss. Neither of them knows how to fix it. Sound familiar?
Once the strangness of these characters is stripped away this is a book about life and the toll it takes on us as we live it. I highly recommend it. And I am looking forward to her next book.

This is an amazing book! The author's style enabled me to join the cirkus myself with every page I turned. There is a character for everyone to identify with which leaves you cheering until the very end. I couldn't put it down. By far one of the best reads ever!

This is an amazing novel!!! The more you read, the more intense it gets. The author describes these characters so vividly that they become real. You will love it.

Detailing the storyline would be redundant. I purchased the book based on the previous reviews and was rewarded with something I wish either A) I had written, or B) I could discover to read again. The beautiful storytelling will stay with me forever.

I have always been fascinated by the circus, so I wanted to like this book at least as much as I did Water for Elephants and Night Circus, but I was fairly disappointed. This was one of the first books I downloaded on my Kindle Fire, and I'm really glad I didn't pay for it. The story was mostly interesting, but the spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors throughout were very distracting to this former English teacher, as well as the odd choices for hyphenating words at the end of lines. However, since I am new to reading on the Kindle, I'm not sure if that was due to the space requirements of the device or if it appeared the same in the hardcover book version. In close, the story was okay, not nearly on the par with the two previously mentioned circus books, but the errors throughout ruined it for me.

Holy cow. This book grabbed me by the throat and squeezed, the whole time I was reading. Vivid, beautifully written characters, unabashed darkness and sensuality perfectly woven with gritty humor and human nature. Don't pass this up; it's not often a book can draw you in so tightly and completely that you gasp for air when you finish it. Loved every second, best download on my kindle so far!

Thanks to a Christmas gift, I am returning to a life long love of reading. Cirkus is one of my first books, and I wanted to add my comments. It is well written, and the author did an effective job in holding my interest, and keeping me 'off guard'. I enjoy a book that isn't so predictable that you are sure of the next chapter before you turn the page, and Cirkus certainly lives up to that! It is the kind of book I anxiously read to find out where the plot path will take me, but I know I will be reading it again, to more thoroughly enjoy the details and nuances Frazee incorporated into her work.

Quirky and with unexpected plot twists, I found this book to be very entertaining. Both conventional and unconventional people and emotions are well handled, and the reader learns something about them all. Looking forward to more from this author

My gosh, this book was odd. I wanted to like it. I really did, ever since I first came across it in 2006. I was immediately intrigued by the cover and description, and I added it to my Amazon Wish List. I finally broke down and purchased it myself this year and was very excited to start reading. After about the first 100 pages, I wanted to put it down but I stayed with it till the end.

The first 200 pages of the book read like disjointed short stories going back and forth between the characters featured on the book cover. There's Shanghai, a fire twirling dwarf; Atash and Anna the Siamese Twins; Mariana the gypsy fortune teller and Jakub, her husband who runs the circus. We are treated to choppy glimpses into these characters lives in the circus and the affairs that connect them. One connection in particular is with Milada the acrobat, who is no longer with the cirucs, and who was a past lover of Shanghai. It is not made clear what happened to them until later in the book. These 200 pages are very repetitive though and very slow. The author "tells" you more of the story, rather than "showing" you which makes it very hard to connect with any of the characters and makes the reading a bit dry overall.

Another problem is the use of names. Mariana and Milada, both starting with the letter M, were easy to mix up in the beginning. Had the Siamese twins, Anna and Atasha, not physically been connnected, I probably would have confused them as well. An editor should have at least suggested a different name for one of the M characters. I found myself constantly consulting the book cover to look at the characters (there are 3 more pictured on the back) as I read, which eventually made me mad because I would have liked to conjure up their images on my own. Therefore, the book almost seems to turn into a picture book since the characters are right there and the story is being "told" moreso than shown. There are few other editorial/grammatical glitches, but what book doesn't have those?

The author really begins to open up and breathe real life into the story in the last 100 pages as climaxes finally evolve and action really starts to take place, but by then it was too late for me. I skimmed through it just to find out what happened because I was tired of having already spent too much time reading this slow book. The characters are here, but like chess pieces never moving. The story is here, but comes too late and truly catches the reader off guard in the end. Not a bad try for a first book, but I won't be back to the Cirkus anytime soon.

This book is set in 1899/1900 in the context of a circus troupe containing several Czech members. The focus is mainly on the emotional life of some of the members, including some of the sideshow "freaks." Essentially, unusual people in an unusual setting are experiencing the usual problems of life. Disillusionment, a troubled marriage, business problems, first love, jealousy, loss...

I found it absorbing and enjoyable. I did notice that the style seemed to smooth out a bit later in the book, but I was hooked almost from the very beginning. I read the book in one evening. The plot was not obvious to me as I read, so there were surprises and twists along the way.

The perspectives do change frequently, but I didn't have a problem following along. In fact, I didn't really consciously note that "hey, the perspectives change a lot" because I was caught up in the story. I've read other books that do this, and it's not generally a style that hampers my reading. It's usually only a problem for me when the "voices" are so similar that I lose track of whose head I'm supposed to be in at any particular time.

I was particularly impressed with how well the author dealt with the conjoined twins. These were such unusual characters that they could easily have become more of a focus for the reader than the story warranted. As it was, though, the handling of the emotional and physical issues involved was so well done and felt so "natural" that they took their proper place in the story.

As many times as I've heard "show not tell," I'll be darned if I can figure out what it really means or why telling is a bad thing. I've decided that either I like the story or I don't, and I'm not going to worry about whether they did the "right" thing. I don't honestly know whether this story had more "telling" or "showing," but I liked the way the story was told and I liked the story.

The writing was occasionally a little stilted, but there were also passages where the text flowed easily and was a pleasure to read. Shanghai's journal entries were the best example, for me. The physical settings of the story, both the circus itself and the areas it visited, were not neglected and the descriptions were evocative and fit well into the overall flow.

Several Czech words are sprinkled throughout the book. In many cases, a translation follows: "Mluvite Cesky?" "Do you speak Czech?" This was mentioned in an Amazon discussion I read recently as something that sets some readers' teeth on edge, so I think that's why it caught my attention. Honestly, I'm not sure how one would work around it. Non-English phrases that aren't translated and can't be fully determined from context are a bigger irritation to me, so I don't consider it a negative or a flaw, and I rather liked the appearance and "flavor" that the Czech words added.

I did look at the characterization a bit differently after finishing the book and having a more complete understanding. Had I been a beta reader, I would likely have made a couple of suggestions in terms of balance, but I wouldn't say that it would have made it a better book or that the book is flawed as it is.

Technically speaking, the book appears to be largely free of spelling, grammar, or punctuation issues. Nothing jumped out at me, and such things do tend to catch my attention. The capitalization struck me as a little inconsistent at times, but nothing egregious and I can't even remember any examples off the top of my head the day after reading the book.

Was looking for this title, which I read a while back, so I could send a synopsis to a friend. All I see are reviews by readers. Not very consumer friendly!