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A review by squid_vicious
The Tumbling Turner Sisters by Juliette Fay
2.0
After their father injures his hand and loses his job as a boot stitcher, the four Turner sisters - Nell, Gert, Winnie and Kit - are groomed by their mother into become a traveling vaudeville act in order to pay the bills.
On paper, this book should have been a slam dunk for me: its set in Upstate New York in the 1920's, its about vaudeville and sisters going through a tough time, supporting each other and making a good life for themselves. And yet... something about it just failed to grab me.
Fay tells this story through the eyes of Gert and Winnie, who are the two sisters with the most opposite characters: the first is flirty and strong-headed, the second shy and bookish. This also should have worked, as such characters would have looked at the same situations very differently. But I often had to check the chapter heading to make sure I knew which sister was narrating this particular one. Also, when their mother Ethel decides that the sisters will become acrobats and makes them practice, that decision seems to come out of nothing more than her own frustrated desire to be on stage: wasn't there anything more practical and less risky they could have done to make some money? They also seem to just pick up the gymnastics out of the blue: we never know if they had any background in it, or if it was hard, if they got hurt or bruised or anything.
This should have been about women making a space for themselves on their own terms in a time and place where women had precious little agency of their own. But that also fell a bit flat as the sisters are basically under their stage-mother's thumb. We get the idea that Gert wants to be more than someone's wife and that Winnie wants to go to college and maybe be a doctor, but I never really felt their yearnings. Fay also pays lip services to a few social issues of the day, such as the constant discrimination the tap dancer Tip has to struggle with, but again, I didn't really feel it.
I think that the lack of atmosphere and vitality is what might have killed it for me. I could never really visualize the girls, their act or costumes, the landscapes they evolved through.
Fun, but too quaint and shallow for me.
On paper, this book should have been a slam dunk for me: its set in Upstate New York in the 1920's, its about vaudeville and sisters going through a tough time, supporting each other and making a good life for themselves. And yet... something about it just failed to grab me.
Fay tells this story through the eyes of Gert and Winnie, who are the two sisters with the most opposite characters: the first is flirty and strong-headed, the second shy and bookish. This also should have worked, as such characters would have looked at the same situations very differently. But I often had to check the chapter heading to make sure I knew which sister was narrating this particular one. Also, when their mother Ethel decides that the sisters will become acrobats and makes them practice, that decision seems to come out of nothing more than her own frustrated desire to be on stage: wasn't there anything more practical and less risky they could have done to make some money? They also seem to just pick up the gymnastics out of the blue: we never know if they had any background in it, or if it was hard, if they got hurt or bruised or anything.
This should have been about women making a space for themselves on their own terms in a time and place where women had precious little agency of their own. But that also fell a bit flat as the sisters are basically under their stage-mother's thumb. We get the idea that Gert wants to be more than someone's wife and that Winnie wants to go to college and maybe be a doctor, but I never really felt their yearnings. Fay also pays lip services to a few social issues of the day, such as the constant discrimination the tap dancer Tip has to struggle with, but again, I didn't really feel it.
I think that the lack of atmosphere and vitality is what might have killed it for me. I could never really visualize the girls, their act or costumes, the landscapes they evolved through.
Fun, but too quaint and shallow for me.