A captivating, mysterious YA novel set in the world of the circus.
In Turley’s debut YA fantasy novel, a teen with a dark past discovers running away to join the circus could get her killed.
Seventeen-year-old orphan Gracie Hart has just committed a murder. Now she needs to get out of Albany before anyone finds the body. She plans on traveling to Chicago to find the aunt and uncle who supposedly live there, but she’s pickpocketed at the train station before accidentally ending up stowing away on a locomotive going the wrong direction. It’s not just any locomotive either. The train carries Vincenzio’s Circus Troupe and Menagerie, and it’s on its way to Montreal. When Gracie is discovered, Vincenzio makes an unexpected job offer. “You’ll be the new assistant for my magician,” he says, “and it’s so easy a monkey could do it. But the costume looks much nicer on a young woman—and it helps that you’re about the same size as our last girl.” The magician is Jack, with whom Gracie has already clashed due to his identical appearance to the man who pickpocketed her. If that isn’t enough, Jack is also the troupe’s knife thrower, and his last assistant ended up with a dagger between her eyes. It quickly becomes apparent that there are strange goings-on at the circus—happenings that mere stage tricks can’t account for—and if Gracie can’t figure them out, she may soon suffer the fate of the magician’s previous assistant! Turley’s prose elegantly embodies the glam and drama of the circus: “Gracie raised her arms high over her head, elbows bent to form a diamond. The flames in the kerosene lights shivered with the motion of air. The crowd inhaled as Jack raised his first knife past his ear. Gracie’s breath caught and she couldn’t bear to keep her eyes open.” Gracie is an immediately engaging protagonist, a surprisingly relatable “guttersnipe” who guides the reader into the carnivalesque world of the traveling circus. There are some aspects of the plot that don’t quite coalesce, but like a good sideshow performance, the book manages to delight and confound.
A captivating, mysterious YA novel set in the world of the circus.Pub Date: May 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4621-4153-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sweetwater Books
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Jones scores again with this highly entertaining, impeccably researched adventure.
In a trilogy finale, swashbuckling mercenaries the Essex Dogs, having gone their separate ways following the bloody siege of Calais, find their way back to each other to fight a new enemy.
With the imminent marriage of King Edward III’s daughter Princess Joan and Castilian regent Alfonso XI’s son Prince Pedro, an easing of tensions between England and its pirating rival is in reach. But all bets are off after Joan dies of the plague. Weary, battle-scarred ex-Dog Loveday FitzTalbot has hopes of settling down with his companion, Gilda, in the English town of Winchelsea, where he buys a tavern. But his life is thrown into turmoil after he turns for help in fixing the tavern’s leaky roof to the king’s sergeant-at-arms Richard Large, who wants to recruit him for the fight against Castilian pirates. Reluctant at first, Loveday is drawn in after the Castilians rampage through town, burning down his tavern and beating him to a pulp. Then the old warrior encounters his young archer, Romford, who also needs Large’s aid. Romford’s lavish earnings from the fighting in France have petered out through loans to his strapped mentor, Sir Thomas, who is still waiting for the ransom Edward promised him for kidnapping a French aristocrat, the Count of Eu. Romford plans to sneak the count out of Windsor and sell him back to the French. Compared to the widescreen action and ribald turns of Essex Dogs (2022) and Wolves of Winter (2023), this final volume takes a while to really get going. But it’s worth the wait to see the reunited Dogs, including their long-presumed dead comrade Scotsman, rediscover their passion for battle: “Once a man has been to war, it will always come and find him again.”
Jones scores again with this highly entertaining, impeccably researched adventure.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593653807
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
A well-crafted spy novel examines the perils of espionage’s foundation in personal relationships.
The intriguing story of a young woman’s espionage career during World War II weaves in a critique of the British class system.
What sort of people got recruited to be spies by Britain’s famed MI5 intelligence agency during World War II? This absorbing historical novel makes clear they weren’t much like James Bond. Evelyn Varley is a restless young woman living in London in 1939, working for a cosmetics company and making no use at all of her Oxford degree in German, when she’s invited for a rather mysterious job interview. She rapidly goes from typing up reports to infiltrating a group of Nazi sympathizers—and discovering a disturbing personal connection. Starford takes an interesting tack with Evelyn’s background. The daughter of a clerk and a homemaker, she attended a posh boarding school as a scholarship girl, which meant she would either suffer bullies or remake herself in the images of the upper-class girls who harassed her. She chose the latter and did it so well she got into Oxford and became a sort of second daughter to the family of her best friend, Sally—a family that’s one of the wealthiest in England. When Evelyn goes to work for MI5, she discovers others who, like her, are outsiders in the rigid British class system but have found ways to assimilate by assuming an identity, an essential part of spycraft. As the war looms, the challenge for Evelyn is assimilating with people she finds abhorrent. Most of the novel is set in the years just before and after Britain’s entry into the war. Occasional chapters flash-forward to 1948, when Evelyn is trying to put her life back together after some unnamed catastrophe and tentatively falling in love. The book is rich with historical details, right down to clothing styles and furnishings. The plot sometimes slows amid those details, but most of the book is well paced. The novel’s depiction of Evelyn’s career is exciting, but it also suggests the human cost: No matter how skilled her performances, to those above her in the social hierarchy, she’s expendable.
A well-crafted spy novel examines the perils of espionage’s foundation in personal relationships.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-303788-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
