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A review by nickfourtimes
Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry
5.0
1) "My mother was fearsome and beautiful, the impresario of the sideshow; she brought me and my sister up on sawdust, greasepaint, and applause. Her name—known throughout the music halls and traveling tent shows of America—was Friendship Willingbird Church. She was born to a clan of miners in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but ran away from home when her older brother was killed at Antietam. She cut off her hair, joined the infantry, and saw her first battle at the age of fourteen. In the tent at night, she buried her face in the gunnysack pillow and wept bitterly thinking of him, hungry for revenge. A month later she was wounded. In the leaking hospital tent, a nurse cut open her uniform and discovered her secret. Before the surgeon could return, however, the nurse—not much older than Friendship herself—dug out the bullet, sewed up her thigh with a fiddle string, and sent her back to Punxsutawney in the dead of night."
2) "Sometimes he thought that if he'd grown up with another life—in that room with the crying woman in the white kerchief—he might have learned how to swim. He might have been a man who dove beneath the slick, baked water of the river, down to the coldest depths, to the black ravaged bed and nests of hoggleweed. He might have glided through mazes of fallen cargo, prizing open crates, turning out the pockets of drowned men and scavenging shipwrecks for loot. He imagined swimming through the sunken pavilion with turtles and eels, twisting glass baubles from old chandeliers, wresting caviar spoons from the river shrubs. But instead the sight of the river—sucking at the rust on the hulls, foaming and whipping in the morning wind, tossing flotsam on its way to the sea—only made him sick."
3) "Now she gazed back to Manhattan as the dark water carried them away—the huge sky above, the pale glimmer of stars, the shipmasts in the haze. She reached over and took Sylvan's hand. They cannot burn! They cannot sink!
And the city itself: an island of light. All of those windows, all of those rooms—lit now by candles and electric bulbs, hearthfires and stoves. Deep in its burrows were a thousand hands to kindle the torch: the flick of a match, the turn of a lamp, the spark of a switch; embers rising from chimneys to join the sun. The great hive glowed in its smoke. The world was lit by fire."
2) "Sometimes he thought that if he'd grown up with another life—in that room with the crying woman in the white kerchief—he might have learned how to swim. He might have been a man who dove beneath the slick, baked water of the river, down to the coldest depths, to the black ravaged bed and nests of hoggleweed. He might have glided through mazes of fallen cargo, prizing open crates, turning out the pockets of drowned men and scavenging shipwrecks for loot. He imagined swimming through the sunken pavilion with turtles and eels, twisting glass baubles from old chandeliers, wresting caviar spoons from the river shrubs. But instead the sight of the river—sucking at the rust on the hulls, foaming and whipping in the morning wind, tossing flotsam on its way to the sea—only made him sick."
3) "Now she gazed back to Manhattan as the dark water carried them away—the huge sky above, the pale glimmer of stars, the shipmasts in the haze. She reached over and took Sylvan's hand. They cannot burn! They cannot sink!
And the city itself: an island of light. All of those windows, all of those rooms—lit now by candles and electric bulbs, hearthfires and stoves. Deep in its burrows were a thousand hands to kindle the torch: the flick of a match, the turn of a lamp, the spark of a switch; embers rising from chimneys to join the sun. The great hive glowed in its smoke. The world was lit by fire."