TITLE: The Grand Tour: A Jackson’s Unreal Circus & Mobile Marmalade Collection
AUTHOR: E. Catherine Tobler
202 pages, Apex Book Company, ISBN 9781937009816 (paperback, ebook)
DESCRIPTION: (from the Goodreads page): Step right up! Come one, come all, to Jackson's Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade. The steam train may look older than your great-grandmother's' china, but within her metal corridors are destinations you have only ever dreamed. They're real, friends, each and every one—and yours for the taking.
Witness Rabi, Vanquisher and Vanisher Extraordinaire, who can make coins and the past vanish before your very eyes. Dare to visit the Beauty and the Beast, our conjoined twins who are terrible and tortured by turns. Sample Beth's marmalade, the sticky sweetness containing the very memory of the day you turned sixteen, and your beloved's lips touched yours once and never again. It's worth the price, traveler. Jackson's Unreal Circus is where you can be whoever or whatever you want. Whether it be a ride on the Ferris wheel, slipping inside a skin that is not your own, or the opportunity to live as you never have before—it is all possible on this, the grandest of tours. The train beckons you—come, come!
For the first time, E. Catherine Tobler has compiled a collection of her popular circus stories. With nine stories ranging from the first publishing within this universe to a previously unpublished piece, this is your ticket to her magical world. Welcome to The Grand Tour.
MY RATING: five out of five stars
MY THOUGHTS: The stories that comprise E. Catherine Tobler’s The Grand Tour are ethereal and luminous, delicately woven character studies that shine a light on the complicated nature of relationships. Found families and blood families, unrequited and requited love, past and present, mundane and magical, all can be found dissected and interrogated in these pages. But ethereal does not mean these stories lack weight and luminous does not mean they are sunny and happy. The nine Jackson’s Circus stories in The Grand Tour explore the dark edges of community and personal responsibility, the ways in which we act selflessly or selfishly and in which the universe responds.
The denizens of this traveling circus are a “found family,” cobbled together as people join and leave over the course of the stories. Some members stay only long enough to resolve whatever issues they are running from (for instance, Rabi and the little girl he befriends in “Vanishing Act,” which starts the collection) and some have been with the circus so long they seem to have forgotten – willfully or not – exactly how or when they joined up (Beth, the eponymous character of “Lady Marmalade”). But some members are actual family: the light-and-dark sisters Sombra and Gemma, for instance, or the aforementioned Beth and at least one sibling (the identity of who I will not spoil). What is obvious, even if he never directly says it, is that Jackson will never turn away someone who needs what the circus can provide: a haven, a respite, a place for self-discovery, a place to help others. The cohesiveness of the family unit is evident in the way characters appear in each others’ stories, sometimes in larger roles and sometimes smaller. Sombra and Gemma provide Rabi and the little girl emotional support in “Vanishing Act,” and Rabi’s woodworking and vanishing skills figure in “Lady Marmalade.” Gabrielle, the main character of “Artificial Nocturne,” plays a brief but pivotal role in “Every Season,” while the bird-woman Agnessa, who takes Gabrielle under her wings in “Artificial Nocturne” also appears in “We, As One, Trailing Embers” and “Blow the Moon Out.” Beth’s marmalade appears, if not the woman herself, in almost every story. Other circus folk appear in small roles without getting a feature of their own. I’d love to know more, for instance, about the dwarf Eammon (who appears in “Lady Marmalade” and “Every Season”) and the dog-man Dean from “Blow the Moon Out.”
Jackson himself appears more often in cameo or supporting roles than as a main part of the action. His history is hinted at a couple of times, and comes closest to being detailed in “Ebb Stung by the Flow,” but if you want to really know Jackson and learn how he came to run the circus, you’ll have to read Tobler’s novella The Kraken Sea (also from Apex Book Company). In these stories Jackson appears as a distant father figure (“Vanishing Act”), a controlling ringmaster (“Liminal”), and a barker/pimp (“We, As One, Trailing Embers”) and even as the character through home other characters see (“Lady Marmalade” and “Ebb Stung by the Flow”). He can be warm and inviting or cold and capricious (most notably in “Artificial Nocturne” and “We, As One, Trailing Embers”), often in the same story and always driven by his sense of justice for the outcast and downtrodden.
Whether Jackson is an active participant or not doesn’t change the effectiveness of these stories. The characters are often at crossroads (physically or metaphorically): confronting personal flaws, past bad decisions, what they’re running or hiding from. Being a part of the circus, or interacting with it, may help them come to terms with grief or find their way into their own identity or find the path from who they’ve become back to who they were (not necessarily regressing in personality so much as finding the good in the past and melding it with the present). With so much connectivity between characters’ past and present, I think it’s important that the structure of the collection is not chronological. The stories bounce between decades and locations, with more than one story strongly implying that the circus train itself is capable of jumping in time in space as it needs/wants to. And several stories take place primarily in locations outside the circus environs. “Artificial Nocturne,” “Blow the Moon Out,” and “Every Season” all start with characters in or near their homes making a decision to visit (or not visit) Jackson’s Circus; these stories focus on the lives of the main characters and how visiting the circus results in positive, if sometimes incremental, changes to those lives.
Like the members of the circus itself, these stories are hard to categorize. There are modern fantasy elements in many, but not all. There’s an SFnal tinge to several. There are call-backs to ancient mythologies (the fates, the Maenads, phoenix imagery, some Celtic imagery as well). My second favorite story in the book, “Blow the Moon Out,” reads as if it is Tobler’s all-girl urban-setting take on Stephen King’s “The Body” (four kids sneak out to go on an adventure, encounter a dead body and danger and learn a lot about themselves).
My favorite story in the book, “Every Season,” is about a gay couple, Sam and Harper, and Harper coming to terms with his past self while grappling with whether Sam could love him if he knew the truth. Harper is drawn to the circus despite knowing it has the potential to unveil his hidden secrets; the marmalade Sam buys from Beth every time the circus comes to town is dangerous enough in his mind. This is a story about closets, about memories (false and true), about internalized transphobia, about the ability of music to move us to take chances and to guide us towards healing … and I cried more than once. It’s also the one story that has not appeared elsewhere and in my mind is worth the price of admission on its own.
Tobler has several more Jackson’s Circus stories that are not collected in this volume. I can only hope this volume sells well enough that Apex commissions a second volume with the rest of the extant stories and the two more that Tobler hasn’t had published yet.
I received an Electronic Advance Review Copy from the publisher without expectations.
