The Life She Was Given
A Moving and Emotional Saga of Family and Resilient Women
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- €10.99
Publisher Description
Before We Were Yours meets Water for Elephants in New York Times bestselling author Ellen Marie Wiseman’s vivid, daring, emotional novel about the devastating power of family secrets—beginning in the poignant, lurid world of a Depression-era traveling circus and coming full circle in the transformative 1950s.
On a summer evening in 1931, Lilly Blackwood glimpses circus lights from the grimy window of her attic bedroom. Lilly isn’t allowed to explore the meadows around Blackwood Manor. She’s never even ventured beyond her narrow room. Momma insists it’s for Lilly’s own protection, that people would be afraid if they saw her. But on this unforgettable night, Lilly is taken outside for the first time—and sold to the circus sideshow.
More than two decades later, nineteen-year-old Julia Blackwood inherits her parents’ estate. For Julia, home was an unhappy place full of rules and forbidden rooms. She hopes that returning might erase those painful memories. Instead, she becomes immersed in a mystery involving a hidden attic room and photos of circus scenes featuring a striking young girl.
At first, The Barlow Brothers’ Circus is just another prison for Lilly. But in this rag-tag, sometimes brutal world, Lilly discovers strength, friendship, and a rare affinity for animals. Thanks to elephants Pepper and JoJo, and their handler, Cole, Lilly is no longer a spectacle but the circus’s biggest attraction . . . until tragedy and cruelty collide. It will fall to Julia to uncover Lilly’s fate and her family’s shocking betrayal, and somehow make Blackwood Manor a place of healing at last.
Moving between Julia and Lilly’s stories, Ellen Marie Wiseman portrays two extraordinary, very different women in a novel that is tender, heart wrenching, and hopeful.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wiseman alternates between 1930s and 1950s New York State in this emotional tale of one young girl's tragedy and another's coming of age. At Blackwood Manor Horse Farm in 1930s New York, nine-year-old Lilly Blackwood bemoans the fact that her mother won't let her out of her attic room. She wants to visit the local circus, which she can see with her telescope. Instead, her mother sells her to the circus because of Lilly's albinism. The narrative jumps ahead to the 1950s, when 18-year-old runaway Julia Blackwood learns that she has inherited Blackwood Manor in the wake of her parents' death. Back in the 1930s, as Lilly grows up in the circus, she makes friends with some other members of the troupe. And in the 1950s, as Julia learns how to run the horse farm, she tries to uncover the secret of the manor's attic room and the old pictures of a mysterious girl who was a member of a circus. Wiseman has created two equally enticing story lines that gradually reveal the commonalities between them. This well-crafted novel provides rewards throughout.
