The Circus in Winter (2004) By Cathy Day

I enjoy reading, yet routinely I’m ready for a book to end long before I get to the final page; but with The Circus in Winter, I would have been perfectly content for it to go on for another 300 pages.  That may be the strongest recommendation I’ve ever given a book.  A none-too-small part of that gush is the book’s relevance to my childhood -- settle down, I wasn’t a circus kid.

It’s an odd book; a collection of related short stories about people in the quasi-fictional town of Lima, Indiana.  I say “quasi” because Cathy Day, the book’s author, grew up in Peru, Indiana, where history has it a now long defunct circus spent its winter months.  This geography and the town folk are something I’m rather familiar with, being a native of northern Indiana. I particularly relate to the underlying subplot shared by all of the characters: the “comfort” of living in a small Midwestern town, versus the “get me outta here” dynamic. I knew this dilemma personally – one foot in then-small town Portage, the other foot in “the Chicago metropolitan area.” In my case, Chicago won out, though most of my large family remains in Indiana.

The book begins with a short biography of Wallace Porter, one of the "leading citizens" of Lima. On his annual business trip to New York he falls in love and marries.  His new wife however is rapidly stifled by life in a small town. In chapter 2, after it becomes clear she does not have long to live, he decides to buy a circus so that they can travel endlessly ... her dream.  She dies that day.  Afterwards, he keeps the circus, and it becomes his family. Just as it became his family, it also became a part of the fabric of the town.

There are chapters in this book that are just priceless, such as the Gypsies at the KOA camp.  But I’ll let you learn this on your own.  A note of caution: this is not a children’s book.

I found out about this book because it was referenced in the course material for a seminar on Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio) at Chicago’s renowned Newberry Library. The materials placed her in Anderson's genre.  Fair enough, though she has a style that stands on its own quite sufficiently.  Further inquiry lead me to discover that a recent class of the Theater Department at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana (a.k.a. Middletown) turned the book into Circus in Winter, The Musical. I truly would have loved to have seen that!