Once there was a girl who ran away and joined a traveling carnival.
She married a man she hated and begat a child she could never love.
Now Ellen has a new life, a new husband and two normal children.
Memory is drowned in alcohol and prayers–neither of which will save her kids when the carnival comes back to town. A premiere release by the bestselling author of Dragon Tears.
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.”
You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
–ANNA ROOSEVELT “Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
–LEO TOLSTOY “Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.”
ELLEN STRAKER SAT at the small kitchen table in the Airstream travel trailer, listening to the night wind, trying not to hear the strange scratching that came from the baby’s bassinet.
Tall oaks, maples, and birches swayed in the dark grove where the trailer was parked. Leaves rustled like the starched, black skirts of witches. The wind swept down from the cloud-plated Pennsylvania sky, pushing the August darkness through the trees, gently rocking the trailer, groaning, murmuring, sighing, heavy with the scent of oncoming rain. It picked up the hurlyburly sounds of the nearby carnival, tore them apart as if they were fragments of a flimsy fabric, and drove the tattered threads of noise through the screen that covered the open window above the kitchen table.
