Review: The Life She Was Given by Ellen Marie Wiseman

 

Honestly, what drew me to The Life She Was Given in the first place is its wonderful cover art. Well, that and the 1930s traveling circus setting because that lifestyle has intrigued me since I was first exposed to traveling carnivals way back in the early fifties. Those things always carried an air of disreputable people and shows maybe just barely kept within the confines of local laws, a dangerous self-contained little world that the "rubes" had best not look too closely at. So where else would a kid want to be?

And that is most certainly the world that Ellen Marie Wiseman recreates in this 2017 novel. Even though it may seem otherwise, I promise you that I am not going to reveal any spoilers that the publisher does not reveal in its own description of the novel. In fact, I probably won't go as far as the publisher did because I think they revealed a little too much already.

This is the story of two little girls who grew up in the same house some nineteen or twenty years apart, one in the 1930s, and one in the 1950s. Neither child really enjoyed the experience, but Lilly (the first of them to live there) had it the worst by far. Lilly, you see, lives the first twelve years of her life in the house's third-floor attic, never being allowed outside a single minute of her life...until her mother decides to walk her across the fields one night in order to sell her to a circus that is leaving the area the next morning. 

Julia grows up in the same house, with the same parents, believing she is the first child to do so. But Julia's mother is so strict, so overprotective, and so unbending that Julia runs away from home as a teenager and will not go back until she inherits the house and horse business from her deceased parents. That's when she stumbles upon some evidence that all was not as it seemed during her childhood, that some child spent a whole lot of time living in the attic of her childhood home.

I never expected Lilly to have an easy life in the circus; I expected her to be exploited and forced to do some things she would have never done on her own. I knew that circus animals, especially the performers, were not always trained or treated as humanely as some might think. And of course, that's a big part of the tension in the novel's plot. But - and I suppose it proves the power of Wiseman's prose - I didn't expect to be nearly so horrified by the intensity of the scenes involving animal cruelty, sexual brutality, and child abuse. 

Consequently, I still haven't decided how to "rate" The Life She Was Given in terms of "stars." Is it a one-star book or a five-star book? A legitimate argument can probably be made either way depending on the individual reader's reaction to those scenes and topics. I finally gave up and decided to call it a three-star book. Others may scoff at whatever rating you choose, because it all comes down to your own tolerance for reading about this kind of violence. Your call.