Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Birch

Published by Doubleday on November 8, 2016

Julia Pastrana has traveled by train from Mexico to New Orleans at the invitation of Matthew Rates, who met Julia when she was singing and playing her guitar at a wedding. Rates is introduced to Julia as being in the “entertainment business.” Actually, he manages a traveling freak show. Julia is expected to be a headliner because of her resemblance to a cuddly ape. Advertised as a “hybrid bear woman,” Julia joins a pinhead, a girl with no limbs, a rubber-skin man, and an albino black. It is 1854 and nobody has given much thought to the offensive nature of freak shows.

Julia feels she has been cursed, punished for the sins of the mother who abandoned her. Sometimes she wonders if she’s really a human. But freak is the last word that should be used to describe Julia. She is bright and funny and talented, possessed of a kind heart and a will to see the world. Despite her courage, Julia doesn’t dare venture out alone, for fear that people of less intelligence will attack her because attacking anyone different is what stupid people do.

Julia goes through another manager before she signs a contract with Theo Lent, who takes her to Europe. Lent is jealous and insecure, everything that Julia is not. Yet even in Europe, people find Julia unnerving. She scares children. Editorials condemn her for being seen in public.

Julia, while sometimes saddened, does not succumb to self-pity. She works hard and, like anyone else, she wants to be appreciated. Sometimes she is revered and other times she is condemned. The public tends to like her (their appetite for freaks is insatiable) but the guardians of decency scorn her. The novel demonstrates how little things change -- even today, the guardians of decency scorn everyone who doesn’t look, speak, and think just like they do.

Carol Birch based Orphans of the Carnival on a true story and presumably stuck closely to events that actually occurred in Julia’s life. The novel eventually gives Julia something like a love story involving Theo, whose personality is a complex blend of selfishness and self-hatred and obsessive love. In the end, he’s a bit creepy, while Julia is saintly.

Infrequent but semi-regular interludes reveal the story of Rose, a hoarder who has collected all the eyelashes that ever fell from her eyes. Rose lives in the present with Adam and their love story, like Julia’s, is unconventional. The brief interludes lead to a longer conclusion that tie the stories together. Adding the modern story is an interesting plot device, but I’m not sure its inclusion in the novel accomplishes its intended purpose.

The characters in Orphans of the Carnival are fully realized and that’s the novel’s strength. Its weakness is that the story hews closely to the facts of Julia’s life, which leaves little room for imaginative plotting. Birch let her imagination soar in Jamrach’s Menagerie, but here she reins it in a bit too much. Still, she brings the characters to life with emotional honesty that makes Orphans of the Carnival an easy novel to admire.

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