Kristy Cambron

Dear Readers, 

Who among us, when we were kids, did not dream of running away with the Circus?  The animals, the travel, the excitement of the crowds. All of it was a lure that sang to most children sometime in that brief period of our lives where innocence made us believe it would be the perfect life. 

The Ringmaster's Wife by Kristy Cambron allows us for a brief time to join the circus and find out what it all about.  It is not just glamour and thrills, it is traveling to a different city every night.  It is jealousy because a new headliner is taking your job and glory.  It is a family but in the size of a small city.  A family that is very normal, with love and laughter and squabbles.  

Mabel Burton leaves her family farm to follow the city lights and find her dreams.  A chance encounter with a tall handsome man changes everything for her.  That man is John Ringling and Mabel finds  herself in the center of the circus world.  The world she keeps telling her husband she will not meddle in.  Well, not everyday, just sometimes.  

25 years later, Lady Rosamund Easling does run away from home to join the circus.  She follows her beloved horse to America to help train lngenue for the circus.  Rose agrees to stay a few months to make sure everything is going smoothly and then will head back to England to marry the man her parents have picked out for her.  

I will be honest, I wasn't sure I was going to like the book as much as I did.  I didn't dream long about running away to a circus.  I have only seen a few in my life and though they are fun to go to, they are just not my thing.  But I found myself completely drawn in by the storyline.  

Kristy has a wonderful way of writing that makes you want to become part of the story.  You can hear the Calliope playing, you can almost smell the animals and you definitely can see the crowds.  Everything becomes real and now that I am done reading I feel like I have experienced the circus and have checked that wish off my list of things I needed to do.  

I recommended Kristy's books in the past because of the tough subject matter that she writes about, this one I recommend because it speaks to the heart of the child that still lives in all of us.  

I can't wait for Kristy's next book.  She is an author who has made the must read list as she hasn't just written about one topic, but about people that you really want to met.  

Happy Reading, 

Kristy Cambron

Dear Readers,

 

After reading The Butterfly and the Violin by Kristy Cambron I could hardly wait to see what she was going to do next.  Finally A Sparrow in Terrezin arrived and I was so excited to get started.  I waited until I was headed out on vacation and disappeared once again into the story of Sera and William.

 

Once again Kristy blends a contemporary story with a historical story.  Using WWII as the backdrop we meet Kaja this time.  She is a young lady whose parents risk everything to send her and her sister out of Poland as the Germans march in.  She finishes her education in Palestine and moves to England to work.  Her heart is back in Prague with her parents, but she knows she is safer in London.  That is until she reads the headlines about the death camps and how thousands of Jews are being killed.  She know she needs to return to try to save her parents. 

 

Sera and William are in for their own battle.  One that may cost William his freedom.  Someone in the company sold several pieces of art without the board of director's permission and seems to have pocketed the money. All the evidence they have points to William.   Sera needs to find the evidence that will correct the mistake and may also answer some of her questions about what happened between her husband and his father. It is a story that no one will talk about. 

 

I was just talking to a fellow employee about wars on our home soil.  We here in America have no idea what that is really like.  What is it like to have an enemy army march onto our land and tell us they are taking over and we are now all required to do what they tell us.  That may even include turning in our neighbors because of their religion or family background. 

 

Neither one of us had answer to what we would do if that would happen here.  The thought of running and leaving everything we own behind to try to save ourselves and our family was just not something we could really relate to.  But books like this make you remember that throughout history, people have been trying to save their families in the best way possible and sometimes it meant that they all ended up in a prison camp together. 

I have said this before and just recently, I love when fiction books generate conversations like this.  Suddenly history comes alive and we can maybe actually learn something from it.  I would love to say that we have learned from what the Nazis did, but history since then has proven that it not true.  There are still things going on in the world today that we know are the same as during WWII, maybe not huge death camps, but still one set of people trying to rid the world of another set of people and the rest of the world stands by and watches. 

 

And all that from a fiction book. Amazing.

Happy Reading,

P.S. I received a copy of this book from book look bloggers for my honest review.

Kristy Cambron

Dear Readers,

The Butterfly and the Violin by Kristy Cambron is one of the WWII books that I put aside because I had read too many books about concentration camps all at once. I needed to read about something, anything else.  Well, I couldn’t wait any longer and I am so glad I didn’t as this is a fantastic book. 

Adele is Austria’s sweetheart. She is the youngest member of the Austrian Philharmonic when the 3^rd Reich has taken over.  She lives a very sheltered life and has no idea what true horrors the Reich is bringing to the rest of the world.  She has heard rumors, but not many because her parents have protected her from all those horrible things.   Her father is a general in the military and supports the Nazis and her mother seem to live in a world that doesn’t really exist.

Adele’s happy world is shattered the night she finds out what is really going on with the Nazis and the Jews.  She then agrees to help try to get a family of Jews out of town.  She is caught helping them and sent to Aushwitz where she becomes part of the woman’s orchestra.  Her world is upside down and she is forced into a new reality, one that is, to say the least, difficult to understand and handle. 

Kristy uses her books to show us some of the stories of Auschwitz.  They may not be ones we have heard before, but that doesn’t mean they are any less important that the more familiar ones.  At one time Adele struggles with having to get up in the morning to go play happy, cheerful music for the prisoners headed off to a brutal day of work. She wonders how she can continue doing that when she knows that many of them won’t return from the work detail just because they are starving to death.

It makes you wonder about the beauty that was produced in that concentration camp.  Part of this book is a contemporary story about the search for the woman behind a painting that Sera has been familiar with since she was a young girl.  Who would paint a picture of a prisoner, and why?  Interesting.  There are so many stories of what happened to certain people behind those fences that we may never know, but Kristy gives us a little glimpse of one of these stories. 

I could go on and on as there is more than one thread running through this book. It makes you think about the families and what happened to them once they were feet on the ground in Auschwitz.  Not knowing what happened to each other and how even those that were in the same prison camp had no idea if their family members were alive or dead.  How to the Nazis it was so important to dehumanize the prisoners so they could break their will and make them easier to control. 

Not a happy, easy book to read, but one that is so worth it. 

Happy Reading,