Church of Marvels
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Narrated by:
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Denice Stradling
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By:
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Leslie Parry
About this listen
A ravishing first novel set in the vibrant, tumultuous world of turn-of-the-century New York, about four outsiders whose lives become entwined over the course of one fateful night.
New York, 1899. It's late on a warm city night when Sylvan, a night soiler who cleans out the privies behind the tenement houses, pulls a terrible secret out from the filthy hollows: an abandoned newborn baby. An orphan himself, Sylvan can't bring himself to leave the baby in the slop. He tucks her into his chest, resolving to find out where she belongs.
Odile is the girl on the wheel, target for the famed knife thrower in a show that has long since lost its magic. Odile and her sister, Belle, were raised in the curtained halls of their mother's spectacular Coney Island sideshow, The Church of Marvels, but the sideshow has burnt to the ground, their mother lies dead in the ashes, and Belle has run away to Manhattan.
Alphie wakes up groggy and confused in Blackwell's Lunatic Asylum. The last thing she remembers is a dark stain on the floor, her mother-in-law screaming. She had once walked the streets as an escort and a penny Rembrandt, cleaning up men after their drunken brawls. Now she is married, a lady in a reputable home. She is sure that her imprisonment is a ruse by her husband's vile mother and will do anything to prove her own innocence. But then a young, mute woman is committed alongside her, and when she coughs up a pair of scissors from the depths of her agile throat, a plan is hatched to save them both.
On a single night, these strangers' lives will become irrevocably entwined as secrets come to light and outsiders struggle for acceptance. From the Coney Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East Side, from a spectacular sideshow to a desolate asylum, Leslie Parry makes turn-of-the-century New York feel alive, vivid, and magical in this luminous debut.
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Truly Plaice, an overly large and ungainly girl, is the polar opposite of her sister, Serena Jane, the epitome of feminine perfection. With their parents dead, Truly and Serena Jane are separated: Serena Jane to live a life of privilege as the future May Queen and Truly to live on the outskirts of town, the subject of constant abuse and humiliation.
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meh...
- By Victoria on 02-25-09
By: Tiffany Baker
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The Secret Life of Mrs. London
- By: Rebecca Rosenberg
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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San Francisco, 1915. As America teeters on the brink of world war, Charmian and her husband, famed novelist Jack London, wrestle with genius and desire, politics and marital competitiveness. Charmian longs to be viewed as an equal partner who put her own career on hold to support her husband, but Jack doesn't see it that way...until Charmian is pulled from the audience during a magic show by escape artist Harry Houdini, a man enmeshed in his own complicated marriage. Suddenly charmed, Charmian's eyes open to a world of possibilities.
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Who Knew...?
- By L. Ronayne on 05-04-18
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The Clockwork Three
- By: Matthew Kirby
- Narrated by: Marc Thompson
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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A team of unlikely friends - an orphaned street musician, a hard-working girl from the tenements, and a talented clockmaker's apprentice - discover that together they can overcome even the darkest of fears.
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HASTY CLIMBERS SUFFER SUDDEN FALLS
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 09-17-17
By: Matthew Kirby
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Deathless
- By: Catherynne M. Valente
- Narrated by: Kim de Blecourt
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to Western European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories that have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the 20th century.
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My Favorite Fantasy Book of the Year
- By Robert on 12-29-13
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Thousand Pieces of Gold
- By: Ruthanne Lum McCunn
- Narrated by: Emily Zeller
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Lalu Nathoy's father called his thirteen-year-old daughter his treasure, his "thousand pieces of gold," yet when famine strikes northern China in 1871, he is forced to sell her. Polly, as Lalu is later called, is sold to a brothel, sold again to a slave merchant bound for America, auctioned to a saloonkeeper, and offered as a prize in a poker game. This biographical novel is the extraordinary story of one woman's fight for independence and dignity in the American West.
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Disjointed account of an extraordinary life
- By David on 05-01-15
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The Promise
- By: Ann Weisgarber
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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1900. Young pianist Catherine Wainwright flees the fashionable town of Dayton, Ohio in the wake of a terrible scandal. Heartbroken and facing destitution, she finds herself striking up correspondence with a childhood admirer, the recently widowed Oscar Williams. In desperation she agrees to marry him, but when Catherine travels to Oscar's farm on Galveston Island, Texas—a thousand miles from home—she finds she is little prepared for the life that awaits her.
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Beautifully written and read
- By RueRue on 04-21-14
By: Ann Weisgarber
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Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
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Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
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Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
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Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
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Her Body and Other Parties
- Stories
- By: Carmen Maria Machado
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
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Beautiful
- By Anonymous User on 11-17-17
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The Dressmaker's Dowry
- A Novel
- By: Meredith Jaeger
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Barrie Kreinik
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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For listeners of Lucinda Riley, Sarah Jio, or Susan Meissner, this gripping historical debut novel tells the story of two women: one an immigrant seamstress who disappears from San Francisco's gritty streets in 1876 and the other a young woman in the present day who must delve into the secrets of her husband's wealthy family only to discover that she and the missing dressmaker might be connected in unexpected ways.
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Even two good narrators can't redeem this
- By RueRue on 03-27-17
By: Meredith Jaeger
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Nowhere is a Place
- By: Bernice McFadden
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Nothing can mend a broken heart quite like family. Sherry has struggled all her life to understand who she is, where she comes from, and, most important, why her mother slapped her cheek one summer afternoon. The incident has haunted Sherry, and it causes her to dig into her family's past. Like many family histories, it is fractured and stubbornly reluctant to reveal its secrets. But Sherry is determined to know the full story. In a few days' time, her extended family will gather for a reunion, and Sherry sets off across the country with her mother, Dumpling, to join them.
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A Mother and Daughter Tear. It. Up.
- By Susie on 01-15-14
By: Bernice McFadden
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Liesl & Po
- By: Kei Acedera, Lauren Oliver
- Narrated by: Jim Dale
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Liesl lives in a tiny attic bedroom, locked away by her cruel stepmother. Her only friends are the shadows and the mice - until one night a ghost appears from the darkness. It is Po, who comes from the Other Side. Both Liesl and Po are lonely, but together they are less alone. That same night, an alchemist's apprentice, Will, bungles an important delivery. He accidentally switches a box containing the most powerful magic in the world with one containing something decidedly less remarkable. Will's mistake has tremendous consequences for Liesl and Po....
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Great story made better by a great narrator
- By Marie on 09-16-12
By: Kei Acedera, and others
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Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
- By: Kelly Link - editor, Gavin J. Grant - editor
- Narrated by: Sarah Coomes, Nico Evers-Swindell, Shannon McManus, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine an alternate universe where romance and technology reign. Where tinkerers and dreamers craft and recraft a world of automatons, ornate clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that. Where scientists and schoolgirls, fair folk and Romans, intergalactic bandits, and intrepid orphans - decked out in corsets, clockwerk suits, and tall black boots - solve dastardly crimes, escape from monstrous predicaments, consult oracles, and hover over volcanoes in steam-powered airships.
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MMMM, Orca Bacon
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 09-14-13
By: Kelly Link - editor, and others
What listeners say about Church of Marvels
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Shawscribbles
- 09-06-18
HIghly Recommend!
This is very unique and unusual tale. Shifting points of view through a myriad of characters, Parry tells a story full of mystery and intrigue centred upon a circus family.
Odile and Belle are the twins daughters of the mother who started the Church of Marvels, a Coney Island sideshow. And they are both performers in her show. But when an accidental fire destroys the Church of Marvels, killing their mother, her beloved tigers, and the girls' childhood friends, Belle packs up and leaves while Odile is left to cope with the details.
After a mysterious letter arrives for Odile, she goes in search of her sister, unsure of what she will find. At the same time, Sylvan - a nightsoiler - finds a baby girl from a privvy he is cleaning out. The infant appears dead but revives after a few minutes. Unable to simply drop her at an orphanage, he sneaks her home and starts the search for her family, certain that no mother could abandon a baby like that.
What follows is a surprising action-packed adventure. The pacing in this book is perfect. And the characters are fully developed individuals with their own unique perspectives on what is happening in their lives. Parry doesn't shy away from difficult subjects and approaches them with a clear and authentic voice. The intertwining of narratives and the interconnectedness of the plotlines are brought together masterfully in the finale.
The only weakness in this novel is its dark tone. This is not a happily-ever-after, feel good novel. But that's what makes it so real.
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