Overview
Follow sixteen-year-old Faith Duckle in this audacious and darkly funny tale as she moves through the difficult journey from the schoolyard to the harlequin world of the circus. At fifteen, Faith was lured under the bleachers by a bunch of boys at a football game and raped. Now, almost a year later, a newly thin Faith is haunted by her past, and by the cruel, flippant ghost of her formerly fat self, who is bent on revenge.
This quest for retribution eventually compels Faith to violence, forcing her to flee home in search of the only friend she has — a troubled but caring busboy named Charlie, who is the lover of a sideshow performer — and to tumble into the colorful, transient world of the circus. But as she leaves her old life behind and dives headfirst into a world of adult passions and dreams, mercurial allegiances, and exhilarating self-discovery (while paying considerable dues with a shovel in the elephant tent), Faith ultimately begins to discover who she is and all that she is capable of.
Wonder When You'll Miss Me combines tender wit with page-turning energy and characters as original as they are memorable. By turns harrowing and poignant, lyrical and hilarious, it is a vibrant, compelling novel readers won't forget.
Synopsis
Follow sixteen-year-old Faith Duckle in this audacious and darkly funny tale as she moves through the difficult journey from the schoolyard to the harlequin world of the circus. At fifteen, Faith was lured under the bleachers by a bunch of boys at a football game and raped. Now, almost a year later, a newly thin Faith is haunted by her past, and by the cruel, flippant ghost of her formerly fat self, who is bent on revenge.
This quest for retribution eventually compels Faith to violence, forcing her to flee home in search of the only friend she has — a troubled but caring busboy named Charlie, who is the lover of a sideshow performer — and to tumble into the colorful, transient world of the circus. But as she leaves her old life behind and dives headfirst into a world of adult passions and dreams, mercurial allegiances, and exhilarating self-discovery (while paying considerable dues with a shovel in the elephant tent), Faith ultimately begins to discover who she is and all that she is capable of.
Wonder When You'll Miss Me combines tender wit with page-turning energy and characters as original as they are memorable. By turns harrowing and poignant, lyrical and hilarious, it is a vibrant, compelling novel readers won't forget.
Clea Simon
Despite the grim setup of our protagonist's story, this novel is one of unlikely triumph, a coming-of-age story with twists a shade darker than the average adolescent's, replete with romance and danger, life lessons, and a completely satisfying conclusion.
How can such a dark book be so full of life? Credit author Davis's subtle depiction of Faith's depression and despair, and her exuberant rise into recovery.—The Boston Globe
Editorials
New York Times Book Review
"Amanda Davis writes gently, even poetically about extraordinary brutality. She has a distinctively creepy, even noirish sensibility."Elizabeth Strout
"An utterly unique take on what it means to run away and join a circus."Jonathan Ames
"This book is a circus Pygmalion — a spectacular tale of injury, heartbreak, and metamorphosis."Michelle Chalfoun
"At the end of this rich and satisfying novel...I did not want to leave."Susan Orlean
"This is a marvelous modern-girl odyssey, dark and comic and poignant and smart."Brady Udall
"Amanda Davis has a wicked and inspired imagination."Susan Richards Shreve
"This is such a good book—the voice is so engaging, heartbreaking and true."Michael Chabon
"A story that is at once harrowing and, strangely, filled with adventure."New York Times Book Review
“Amanda Davis writes gently, even poetically about extraordinary brutality. She has a distinctively creepy, even noirish sensibility.”The New Yorker
The circus has long been a refuge for society’s misfits; for some, it is the inherent danger of the acts that offers a welcome escape from reality. Faith—the heroine of the first novel by the late Amanda Davis, Wonder When You'll Miss Me—runs away from her high school, her mother, and the police and remakes herself as Annabelle, the elephant-dung mucker for a traveling circus troupe. Psychologically disjointed (she is trailed at all times by her imaginary alter ego), Annabelle seeks solace in acrobatics. “I wanted to tell her about the woman on the trapeze. How I’d held my breath and how my heart had pounded,” Davis writes. “How I’d seen a whole world up there in the air, and the one down here had disappeared.”Ascension, a novel by Steve Galloway, focuses on the travails of a wire walker named Salvo Ursari. As a child, his parents were killed by Transylvanian villagers; forty-five years later, during the family act on the high wire, his twin daughters plunge to their death. But while Ursari is on the wire, all that matters is the next step. “Immediately everything receded. All his fears, all his memories, all he loved and all he loathed,” Galloway writes.
The eponymous heroine (based on a real-life tiger trainer) of Robert Hough’s The Final Confession of Mabel Stark joins the circus after escaping from a psychiatric ward, where she was committed for refusing to fulfill her wifely duties. For Mabel, life with her big cats reminds her that happiness always has its dark side: “No matter how well things’re going, you always know it’s only a matter of time before a claw catches, or a tooth snags, or a forepaw lashes, and your contentment feels bearable again.” (Andrea Thompson)Clea Simon
Despite the grim setup of our protagonist's story, this novel is one of unlikely triumph, a coming-of-age story with twists a shade darker than the average adolescent's, replete with romance and danger, life lessons, and a completely satisfying conclusion.How can such a dark book be so full of life? Credit author Davis's subtle depiction of Faith's depression and despair, and her exuberant rise into recovery.—The Boston Globe