Joséphine
Written on Nov 3, 2020
So yeah, this one's what I most definitely call a happy surprise and a pretty cover design matching a good book. while it did start out a little slow, and it took me a while to find my bearings as the narration alternated between the lives of two girls — one of a girl who ran away to the circus, and one decades later of her granddaughter who was uprooted from the circus. Since there was only one narrator instead of two, I had to pay much closer attention to chapter headings than I usually do but after some time I got the rhythm and was completely swept up in the story.
I particularly enjoyed the exploration of family myth, how the late grandmother's past affected the granddaughter's present, and how the secrets not even the mother knew had a huge bearing on their identities in the world.