Lezly Herbert checks out the debut novel from author Leslie Parry. A graduate of the acclaimed Iowa’s Writers Workshop, Parry lives in Chicago.
Church of Marvels
by Leslie Parry
Two Roads Books
Leslie Parry lives in Chicago and she takes the reader back to the New York of 1895. Rather than gleaming skyscrapers there are smoke belching factories. Instead of roads and pavements, there are haunting dark alleyways full of cripples, convicts and rye-pickled drifters. It is a time when consumption is decimating the population, grotesque cruelties are rampant and opium dens seduce the weak. The four main characters echo each other’s stories like bad dreams until their lives all converge.
Nineteen year old Sylvan is a curious mix of races and very much a loner. While digging out the privies behind the tenements as a night-soiler, he finds a newborn baby girl. Alphie is in a lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island and the last thing she remembers is a whack on the back of her head by her mother-in-law. Seventeen year old Odile comes to Manhattan from the Coney Island Sideshow in search of her twin sister who disappeared after their mother was killed in a tragic fire. Belle, who was an acrobat and sword swallower on Coney Island, has remained mute since she arrived in Manhattan.
“A golden fog hung low on the riverbank. As Odile walked down Cherry Street, she saw the black glitter of the water, the old row of houses with their crooked shutters and maritime stars. In the air she could smell salt and fish, metallic water pooling between the cobbled bricks, a heel of rye left to harden and mould on the curbside. She passed buildings that seemed to have been lost: dwarfed in the shadows, on streets so narrow no traffic could pass.”
Leslie Parry’s sensory narrative recreates the long-forgotten time in fantastic detail. The reader is with Sylvan, Alphie, Odile and Belle as they walk the streets in search of answers to their predicaments. All the characters are without parents – Sylvan is an orphan, Odile and Belle have lost their only parent and Alphie was thrown out of home and had been living on the streets since the age of 14. Danger is everywhere as secrets are unearthed – right to the very end when they all come together to solve the same mystery.
Lezly Herbert
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