Did you ever ride a cheap carnival roller coaster, where you hear each gear ka-chunking into place as the car laboriously starts out along the teeny-tiny track. That is an apt metaphor for this book, carny setting and all. I was not surprised in the least to read an …more interview with the author in the back, wherein she explains that she fell in love with the world of depression-era circuses and contrived to write the novel about it. Every plot element and character is just that: contrived. The writing is clear and simple--kind of USA Today level--but no one in this book thinks or talks like people from the 1930s. As it so happens, I am a veterinarian from Cornell. In the book, Jacob’s Polish veterinarian (?!) father is killed in an automobile accident, leaving him destitute because his parents mortgaged their house to pay for his "ivy league" education. Did Ms Gruen have to work so hard to have Jacob speak Polish and leave home? Even if his parents died destitute, there would be no reason why he could not take over the practice--it's not like the bank could take the local clients away. And the loss of family home... Cornell's college of veterinary medicine was and remains a land-grant school, i.e. a highly subsidized portion of the agricultural education system of New York. No one had to mortgage their house to attend Cornell's agricultural or veterinary college. And the veterinary detail is so incredibly lame! Horses don't founder for no reason, and there certainly was palliative care, which any horseman would know. And the scenes of gratuitous cruelty, such as slitting old horses’ throats to feed the cats-- surely Ms Gruen, author of Flying Changes, is an equestrian enough to realize any horse not dead yet would quickly overpower the inept horse butcher or run away. If you are bringing people in to a “lost world”, at least try to make the detail plausible! (less)