In 1965 seventeen-year-old Victoria, having just escaped an unstable home, flees to the ultimate place for dreamers and runaways - the circus. Specifically, the VanDrexel Family Circus where, among the lion tamers, roustabouts, and trapeze artists, Victoria hopes to start a better life.
Fifty years later, Victoria’s sixteen-year-old granddaughter Callie is thriving. A gifted and focused tightrope walker with dreams of being a VanDrexel high wire legend just like her grandmother, Callie can’t imagine herself anywhere but the circus. But when Callie’s mother accepts her dream job at an animal sanctuary in Florida just months after Victoria’s death, Callie is forced to leave her lifelong home behind.
Feeling unmoored and out of her element, Callie pores over memorabilia from her family’s days on the road, including a box that belonged to Victoria when she was Callie’s age. In the box, Callie finds notes that Victoria wrote to herself with tips and tricks for navigating her new world. Inspired by this piece of her grandmother’s life, Callie decides to use Victoria’s circus prowess to navigate the uncharted waters of public high school.
Across generations, Victoria and Callie embrace the challenges of starting over, letting go, and finding new families in unexpected places.
Initial thoughts: I was browsing Libby for an audiobook to borrow and listen to on the spot when the cover of We Walked the Sky caught my eye. How could it not when I'm a sucker for circus settings? Plus the visual is really striking with a tightrope walker caught between two different worlds.
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.
