What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorWild Boy
Rob Lloyd Jones · 295 pages
Wild Boy becomes a sideshow freak. Isolated from other children and abused by the cruel master who bought him, Wild Boy becomes an avid observer, developing Sherlock Holmes-like deductive skills. Although he is tormented and insulted, kicked and spat at, his quick mind takes in everything he sees. When a murder occurs at the fair, Wild Boy is accused. Can he use his powers of deduction to save him
The Palace of Curiosities
Rosie Garland · 352 pages
"Before Eve is born, her mother goes to the circus. She swears she hears the lion sigh, just before it leaps... and nine months later when Eve is born, the story goes, she doesn't cry - she meows and licks her paws. When Abel is pulled from the stinking Thames, and the mudlarks search his pockets to divvy up the treasure, his eyes crack open and he coughs up a stream of black water. But, how has h
Beholding Bee
Kimberly Newton Fusco · 336 pages
In 1942, when life turns sour at the carnival that has always been her home, eleven-year-old Bee takes her dog, Peabody, and piglet, Cordelia, and sets out to find a real home, aided by two women only Bee and her pets can see.
The Diamond Thief
Sharon Gosling · 305 pages
No one performs on the circus trapeze like 16-year-old Rémy Brunel. But Rémy also leads another life, prowling through the backstreets of Victorian London as a jewel thief. When she is forced to steal one of the world's most valuable diamonds, she uncovers a world of treachery and fiendish plots.
Orphans of the Carnival
Carol Birch · 380 pages
From the Booker short-listed author of Jamrach's Menagerie comes the extraordinary, moving, and unsettling tale of a woman, branded a freak from birth, who becomes an international sensation but longs for genuine human connection London had the best freaks, always had. The Egyptian Hall, the Promenade of Wonders, the Siamese twins, pinheads, midgets, cannibals, giants, living skeletons, the fat, t
The Hunchback Assignments
Arthur Slade
A gripping new series combines Steampunk, spying, and a fantastic Victorian London.The mysterious Mr. Socrates rescues Modo, a child in a traveling freak show. Modo is a hunchback with an amazing ability to transform his appearance, and Mr. Socrates raises him in isolation as an agent for the Permanent Association, a spy agency behind Brittania's efforts to rule the empire. At 14, Modo is left on
A Corner of the Universe
Ann M. Martin · 189 pages
The summer that Hattie turns twelve, she meets the childlike uncle she never knew and becomes friends with a girl who works at the carnival that comes to Hattie's small town.
The Case of the Left-Handed Lady
Nancy Springer · 245 pages
Enola's name backwards spells "alone," and alone she is, in the world's biggest, darkest, dirtiest city. She is being hunted down by the world's most famous detective -- her own brother, Sherlock Holmes. For the sake of freedom she must elude him, but what can she do to ease her loneliness? When she discovers a hidden cache of brilliant charcoal drawings, she feels as if she's a soul mate to th
The Great Trouble: A Mystery of London, the Blue Death, and a Boy Called Eel
Deborah Hopkinson · 249 pages
Eel, an orphan, and his best friend Florrie must help Dr. John Snow prove that cholera is spread through water, and not poisonous air, when an epidemic sweeps across their London neighborhood in 1854. Eel, an orphan, and his best friend Florrie must help Dr. John Snow prove that cholera is spread through water and not poisonous air when an epidemic sweeps across their London neighborhood in 1854.
Circus Galacticus
Deva Fagan · 304 pages
Trix's life in boarding school as an orphan charity case has been hard, but when an alluring young Ringmaster invites her, a gymnast, to join Circus Galacticus she gainss an entire universe of deadly enemies and potential friends, along with a chance to unravel secrets of her own past.
The Final Confession of Mabel Stark
Robert Hough · 430 pages
The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb
Melanie Benjamin · 424 pages
Mid-nineteenth-century little person Mercy Levinia Warren Bump comes of age in the antebellum south before being invited to join the P. T. Barnum circus, through which she meets her future husband, General Tom Thumb, and pursues limitless international opportunities.
Church of Marvels
Leslie Parry · 308 pages
"New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs. Odile Church and her beautiful sister, Belle, were raised amid the applause and magical pageantry of The Church of Marvels, their mother's spectacular Coney Island side
The Orphan's Tale
Pam Jenoff · 363 pages
Sixteen-year-old Noa, forced to give up her baby fathered by a Nazi soldier, snatches a child from a boxcar containing Jewish infants bound for a concentration camp and takes refuge with a traveling circus, where Astrid, a Jewish aerialist, becomes her mentor.
An Unsuitable Heir
K.J. Charles · 211 pages
**A private detective finds passion, danger, and the love of a lifetime when he hunts down a lost earl in Victorian London.** On the trail of an aristocrat’s secret son, enquiry agent Mark Braglewicz finds his quarry in a music hall, performing as a trapeze artist with his twin sister. Graceful, beautiful, elusive, and strong, Pen Starling is like nobody Mark’s ever met—and everything he’s ever
The Callender Papers
Cynthia Voigt · 214 pages
In nineteenth-century Massachusetts, orphan Jean, employed to sort out the family papers of a reclusive artist, becomes curious about the mysterious, long-ago death of his wife and the subsequent disappearance of their young child.
A Little Princess
Frances Hodgson Burnett · 224 pages
This is a story about a different kind of princess than one might imagine; a princess that is an orphan - lonely, cold, hungry and abused. Sara Crewe begins life as the beloved, pampered daughter of a rich man. When he dies a pauper, she is thrown on the non-existent mercy of her small-minded, mercenary boarding school mistress. Stripped of all her belongings but for one set of clothes and a doll,
The Magician's Lie
Greer Macallister · 320 pages
The Amazing Arden is the most famous female illusionist of her day, renowned for her notorious trick of sawing a man in half on stage. One night in Waterloo, Iowa, with young policeman Virgil Holt watching from the audience, she swaps her trademark saw for a fire ax. Is it a new version of the illusion, or an all-too-real murder? When Arden's husband is found lifeless beneath the stage later that
Water for Elephants
Sara Gruen · 352 pages
As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there
Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show
Frank Delaney · 427 pages
Wonder Show
Hannah Barnaby
"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, step inside Mosco's Traveling Wonder Show, a menagerie of human curiosities and misfits guaranteed to astound and amaze! But perhaps the strangest act of Mosco's display is Portia Remini, a normal among the freaks, on the run from McGreavy's Home for Wayward Girls, where Mister watches and waits. He said he would always find Portia, that she could never leave
The Lady and the Lionheart
Joanne Bischof · 428 pages
The Hidden Gallery
Maryrose Wood · 313 pages
Fifteen-year-old Miss Penelope Lumley, a governess trained at the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females, takes the three Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place to London, England, and learns they are under a curse.