Orphans of the Carnival

September 26, 2016
Birch’s vivid novel is about the life of an infamous Mexican orphan named Julia Pastrana. The performer (based on a real person who lived from 1834 to 1860) first appeared on the carnival stage in New Orleans in the mid-1800s. She was a slight girl with delicate feet who sang, danced, and spoke several languages. She’s also described as having the face of an ape, her body covered with hair (“ ‘It’s not fur,’ she always scolded, ‘it’s hair.’ ”). As in her previous novel, the Booker-nominated Jamrach’s Menagerie, Birch follows a forgotten historical figure living in an age when Darwin was the rage and the boundaries of society were strict. Julia seemed an ordinary girl who worked hard to perfect her act as she traveled the world, from New York to London, Berlin to St. Petersburg. Though it’s arguable that she’s not being exploited by the minders, rubes, and carnival folk with whom she travels, Julia accepts the dastardly marriage proposal of Theo Lent, her manager. Along the road, Julia and Theo meet many colorful people, some grand and some who cannot come to terms with what Julia is. Woven into this historical narrative is the story of a 21st-century girl called Rose, an endearing hoarder who has found a doll in a rubbish bin in London that was once a beloved possession of Julia’s. Rose is a memorable character, and the rest of the cast of misfits, dolls, and bad guys are just as full of nuance. Among the novel’s many pleasures are Birch’s compelling turns of phrase, and an immersive, melancholy milieu.

November 15, 2016
What does it mean to be human?In 2013, the body of Julia Pastrana was buried in her home state of Sinaloa, Mexico, more than 150 years after she died from a postpartum infection. Before she was finally laid to rest, her carefully preserved corpse carried on a version of the career she had known in life. Born with a rare condition that gave her thick hair on her face and body, Pastrana had traveled the United States and Europe as a human oddity, and people still paid to gawp at her body after her death. This is fertile material for a storyteller, of course, and familiar territory for Birch. Her last book, Jamrach's Menagerie (a Man Booker Prize finalist in 2011), follows a boy hired to care for exotic animals in 19th-century London. Both novels explore the Victorian taste for the strange and the disturbing. Julia arrives in the U.S. during what might be called a golden age for freak shows, and this novel is full of singular performers. Birch is careful, though, to render them as actual people. Julia herself embodies the disconnect between appearances--or what we think we can learn from appearances--and reality that runs through the book. She is billed as a human-animal hybrid, but she sings with grace. What thrills the audience is the contrast between her simian face and the very human, recognizably feminine, voice that comes out of it. Birch's prose is, throughout, cautious and quiet. Eventually, though, her efforts to avoid the sensational become a liability. Beneath the surface, Julia just isn't terribly interesting, and neither are the secondary characters that surround her. The narrative succeeds in giving readers a sense of how tedious it is to be a traveling act, but this doesn't exactly make for a spellbinding tale, and Julia's own reflections on her unique life aren't terribly interesting. Theodore Lent--the man who will become her husband, her manager, and the custodian of her corpse--adds some drama, but his introduction comes late in the book. And the modern-day story woven into Julia's distracts without adding anything. Rich material. Wan execution.

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November 1, 2016
You can be as good as anyone, and you can be proud and always stick up for yourself and get respect, but there's one thing you won't get, nena, and that's a man. Not with your face so far gone. Don't expect it. This piece of brutal advice is tossed at Julia Pastrana, a real woman born in nineteenth-century Mexico with hair all over her body and face. Julia is trained as a performer yet is labeled and works as a freak, often at the top of the bill in traveling companies. Birch's (Jamrach's Menagerie, 2011) historical reinterpretation of Julia's life as she travels from city to city around the world and as she manages to get a man is touching if overripe and at times repetitive. The contemporary story Birch weaves in certainly adds a surprising, dark twist at the end, but occasionally it derails Julia's narrative. Still, the lessons learned from Julia's life and death ring true and sobering today in a society that continues to prize conformity and rigidly adheres to narrow definitions of beauty.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2016

British author Birch, whose imaginatively bristling Jamrach's Menagerie was long-listed for the Orange Prize and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, returns with a reenvisioned life of Julia Pastrana, a celebrated carnival performer in the mid-1800s who suffered from what is now called hypertrichosis--she had a heavy beard and hairy forehead. A remarkable dancer who sang beautifully and spoke three languages, she socialized with high society but longed for real human connection. Throughout, Birch makes us wonder whether Julia's manager truly cared for her or was just another exploiter.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2016

Birch (Jamrach's Menagerie) reimagines the life of Julia Pastrana, a 19th-century indigenous Mexican woman, born with hair all over her body and facial abnormalities, who becomes a carnival freak and musical performer of worldwide renown. After her discovery by an American promoter, Julia ventures to New Orleans and points north before embarking on a European tour with her handsome young manager, who shocks the world by marrying her. Remarkably poised, well educated, and refined, she is nevertheless subjected to casual cruelty and vulgar assaults by ignorant bystanders and medical professionals alike. In Birch's telling, Julia is almost preternaturally good-natured and accepting of her fate. The novel tries hard to make her husband/manager Theo a largely sympathetic figure, somewhat unsuccessfully establishing plausible motivations for his appalling and exploitative behavior after her death. A secondary plot set in 1983 London feels extraneous and disconnected from Julia's story line for much of the book, though a poignant connection is revealed at the very end. VERDICT Though the main character remains somewhat of a cipher, this memorable and affecting novel illuminates a sad and strange forgotten historical figure. [See Prepub Alert, 5/2/16; a LibraryReads November pick.]--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.