More Circus Fiction

Summer Reading recommendations.

Sara Gruen's Water For Elephants
Amazon Link

Water for Elephants is a story of a Depression era mudshow that Jacob Jankowki, a down on his luck veterinary student, joins. The fictional circus Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show On Earth shows the seamy underbelly of that era of circus. The novel is a little bit on the "typical circus fiction" side, but the writing is great, and if you like the circus, you'll probably like this.

Patti Frazee's Cirkus
Amazon Link

This is also a fictional story of an old mud show, focusing more on freaks such as Mariana , the fortune teller who can turn herself invisible, Shanghai a fire-breathing dwarf, and conjoined twins Atasha and Anna. This time the circus is set in the American midwest at the turn of the century, and the circus is the Borefsky Brothers. It's a debut novel by Patti Frazee, who lives in Minneapolis. It's been getting great reviews.

John Irvings's A Son of the Circus
Amazon Link
A book about an Indian circus, with all of John Irving's weird characters (He wrote The World According to Garp). It's about an Indian born doctor who goes back to India to study circus-dwarves. It's got a lot of exposition, as Irving's books do, but there's gold there-- especially if you like Irving and the circus. Which I do. Not as much about India as you would like though.

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Search out More Books on Amazon that are circus fiction
Search out books on Amazon that are about clowns

Scary Clowns

This is a small fun book of over 80 photographs of clowns in a slightly scary or macabre mode. Not all of them are scary, but enough to give those with coulrophobia (fear of clowns) a moment of pause. A fair amount of the photos are classic, but there's also a bunch of other photos that I hadn't seen before. It's definitely a great gift for the clown or clown collector among you. The center of the book has a very cool 3D pop up (pictured). I can recommend this book!




For a couple of scarier options, you might want to visit The Gallery of Scary Clowns A compilation of photographs of scary clowns (most seem to be from Cirque du Soleil.)