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Author: Lizzie Roberts
Genres: Literary Fiction
Detroit, 1985. Gwendolyn Oldham, Lyn to everyone but her mother, is seventeen, the eldest of five, and the only adult in a house that has none. Her mother Eleanor, beautiful, charming and constitutionally unable to hold down a job, is a former back-up singer who never quite stopped hoping to hit it big. When a last-ditch move to Nashville ends with the family station wagon in a ditch on the interstate, it's Lyn who guides everyone back to the city and gets the twins to school.
She has a plan: top grades one more year, escape to Yale. Then she meets Darren in a freight elevator, all confidence plus a family with a dining table, and Adrienne, who steals what she wants and isn't afraid of anything, and the plan starts to dissolve. A birthday card arrives from the father who left, postmarked from just across the river. A storage locker suggests Eleanor has been holding back the truth, as well as money. And Lyn is carrying a secret that will not keep until spring.
Narrated in a voice as sardonic as it is tender, Circus Blood is a novel about a girl who has looked after everyone else for so long that she has forgotten how to be looked after. A debut of rare precision from a writer who makes the whole city breathe.
For readers of Angela Flournoy's The Turner House, Tayari Jones's Silver Sparrow, Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half, and Ann Patchett's Commonwealth.
Author: Lizzie Roberts
Genres: Literary Fiction
Detroit, 1985. Gwendolyn Oldham, Lyn to everyone but her mother, is seventeen, the eldest of five, and the only adult in a house that has none. Her mother Eleanor, beautiful, charming and constitutionally unable to hold down a job, is a former back-up singer who never quite stopped hoping to hit it big. When a last-ditch move to Nashville ends with the family station wagon in a ditch on the interstate, it's Lyn who guides everyone back to the city and gets the twins to school.
She has a plan: top grades one more year, escape to Yale. Then she meets Darren in a freight elevator, all confidence plus a family with a dining table, and Adrienne, who steals what she wants and isn't afraid of anything, and the plan starts to dissolve. A birthday card arrives from the father who left, postmarked from just across the river. A storage locker suggests Eleanor has been holding back the truth, as well as money. And Lyn is carrying a secret that will not keep until spring.
Narrated in a voice as sardonic as it is tender, Circus Blood is a novel about a girl who has looked after everyone else for so long that she has forgotten how to be looked after. A debut of rare precision from a writer who makes the whole city breathe.
For readers of Angela Flournoy's The Turner House, Tayari Jones's Silver Sparrow, Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half, and Ann Patchett's Commonwealth.