a really enjoyable book. The author cleverly moves between different characters point sof view about what is happening in the story, sort of like Wilkie collins or instance at the fingerpost. Different elements of what is really going on are gradually revealed.The story centers on two sisters who perform in a circus. a [art time boxer/night soil collector who finds an abandoned baby, and a transgendered character trying to make a marriage to an undertaker work.
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I received an e-arc of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. This did not affect my opinion of the book in any way.

Actual rating: 2.5/5

I am definitely in the minority on this, but I really did not enjoy reading this book. And I wanted to like it so much!! *sobs* But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't bring myself to be taken from this book. There were just too many things that didn't work for me. For starters, I felt like there were too many POVs. I don't normally mind multiple narrators too much, but here it just felt like the narration was too fragmented and disconnected. The POV alternated too much, too rapidly, and I struggled to keep up. A few times, I actually found myself having to go back and re-read a few parts, simply because I had become too confused by what was happening to actually understand what was going on. I also had real problems with the writing. While it wasn't by any means bad, it just didn't draw me in, and I had difficulty following where it was leading me. And it didn't help that I had to keep looking words up, because there were just SO MANY that I had never heard before, and I had absolutely no clue as to what they meant.

The story was definitely very original, even though I found it hard to follow the various characters. However, I felt that there was an awful lot of telling rather than showing, which really slowed the whole thing down terribly. We actually get to see very little happening in front of us, and most events are shared by the characters after they have happened, as they reflect upon them in the present. And speaking of the characters, I had a very hard time connecting with them, and found them fairly lacking in development. Now, this may just be me, but I felt like they didn't really change that much throughout the book, and then a couple of them just turned their lives around completely at the end of the book... And I just couldn't buy it, because to me it seemed too sudden and radical to be real.

But don't despair just yet! Because there were some positives, too. I LOVED how diverse the characters were! The author managed to include a wide range of diversity in this book, and I think she did a pretty good job of showing the difficulties "different" people would face living in the 1800s, even in a big, modern city like New York. And the historical representation of the city was also very good. Now, I'm no expert, so I actually have no idea if it was accurate at all, but it felt real and that's good enough for me.

I'm very disappointed that I didn't like this book more, because I really thought I would. But I have seen so many other reviewers absolutely adoring it, so don't let me put you off from reading this if you're even mildly interested in it, since it's probably just me. Unfortunately, we just didn't click: I couldn't get into it and I struggled to connect with the characters. I might give it another try in the future to see if my thoughts change at all, but for now it just wasn't a good match. ( )

At about 10 pages before the epilogue, I realized that not everything was going to be explained and I got really excited. We aren't going to know who fathered Bella's baby, and we aren't going to know how the fire started in the theater, and that's great because it's not important to know, and it's not real to know. There are all sorts of things that happen in life that hugely change us but we have no idea what was behind them, and it's still interesting how things play out. Allowing the reader to speculate, or to not speculate and to simply accept them as things that happened "before" - that felt really fresh and interesting and exciting.

And then the epilogue explained who fathered Bella's baby, how the fire started, and threw in some last minute curves about the twins' mom not being their mom.
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The characters in this book are so beautiful. The story is engrossing, at times as tense as a thriller. The writing is great in general. I felt that the theme of "othered" classes living in the gritty corners of a bustling, growing NYC, was deftly handled. But it was the characters that kept me glued to the pages. ( )

This is a lot of story, maybe too much for me but great for other readers. What shines is the setting (I will forgive everything for Coney Island), and the development of complex female characters. ( )