“Running contrary, crosscut to the grain of regular habits: your evening news, your family dinner, retiring at a decent hour. Running at night when regular people are tucked away, stoplights blinking yellow, streets shining wetblack from streetlights and sweepers, the Twenty-four-hour Man staples red cardboard arrows to telephone poles. He uses a stepladder and a staple gun to set the arrows just out of reach of school-bus-waiting kids, weekend yard-sales people, religious nuts with paper proclamations; he sets them at precise angles which speak the subtle tongue of his people. He is the one who points the way.”

…and with that opening paragraph, I was drawn into the raw, gritty, beautiful world of the travelling American Circus. Written with authority, written by someone who seems to know far too much about circus life for this novel to be purely fiction, The Aerialist is a fantastic novel which captures the reader in the first few lines – not with flashing lights or the bright colors of the show itself, but with the promise of being able to see into the depths of the creature – the fight behind making the dreams come true.

It is the story of Gary Ruden, directionless, uninspired, dreamless. Almost accidentally he signs up with a circus as they leave their winter quarters in Venice, Florida. Climbing into the white train, abandoning nothing at all, he finds family, home, and life while on the road, taking us with him as he grows, and finds dreams to continuously reach for.

In a stark and beautiful prose, this book invites the reader into a haunting, real, occasionally bleak and frequently comic story not only of circus life, but the extraordinarily beautiful circus of life, itself.

To anyone who has ever thought of running away with the circus or has, to anyone who has ever felt like that there was always something more out there to go find, to anyone who, at times, looks longingly out the window of their regular home, their regular office, their regular life and dreams of ‘what could be’ if they had the chance to take it or were simply strong enough, desperate enough, or by “regular” standards, foolish enough to chase their dreams, I cannot recommend this book enough.

To anyone who hasn’t – I recommend it even more.

~ kSea flux