Alamosa Public Library

Though he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski's ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its own way of death. The world...

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices plastered on lampposts. It is simply there. Within these nocturnal black-and-white-striped tents awaits an utterly unique experience, a feast for the senses. Beyond the smoke and mirrors, however, a fierce competition is under way, a contest between two young illusionists.

A shoreside burial coordinator who lives in self-enforced exile as penance for a long-ago mistake and a performer with a floating circus face unexpected life changes and new opportunities in the wake of an offshore storm.

Ava is a dancer with a travelling troupe of entertainers. When Clover, a little unicorn, is trapped by Sir Fitzroy and used to lure the other unicorns into danger, Ava hatches a cunning plan. She and Sophy will disguise themselves and foil Sir Fitzroy's plot, and the unicorns will be safe!

"Follows the author on a life-affirming journey of loss and self-discovery through her time on the road with the last traveling American sideshow and her relationship with an adventurous, spirited mother"--Amazon.com

She was only two feet, eight inches tall, but her legend reaches out to us more than a century later. As a child, Mercy Lavinia "Vinnie" Bump was encouraged to live a life hidden away from the public. Instead, she reached out to the immortal impresario P.T. Barnum and married tiny superstar General Tom Thumb in the wedding of the century. A fictionalized account of the Gilded Age and a woman's public triumphs and personal tragedies, this is the...

Fourteen-year-old acrobat, Dessa Redd and the circus strongman, Fisk, are recruited by Topper, the circus juggler for the job of robbing the royal treasury of Kingsbridge, which sets off a series of adventures around the world in order to find Dessa's twin brother, who was kidnapped when they were young.

A vivid, daring novel about the devastating power of family secrets--beginning in the poignant, lurid world of a Depression-era traveling circus and coming full circle in the transformative 1950s. On a summer evening in 1931, Lilly Blackwood glimpses circus lights from the grimy window of her attic bedroom. Lilly isn't allowed to explore the meadows around Blackwood Manor. She's never even ventured beyond her narrow room. Momma insists it's for Lilly's...

Meridon, a vagabond gypsy, allows her vague memories of a very different life, as well as the necklace that is her birthright, to lead her home to Wideacre where she takes her place as its mistress.

"Nightmare Alley "begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek--alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd's gleeful disgust and derision--going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There's no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak...