The Midnight Zoo

The Midnight Zoo by Sonya Hartnett  217 pp.

This is one of the selections for the Treehouse Book Club. It's the story of three Romany Children who escape after the Nazis attack their caravan and they witness the killing of a family member and the arrest of the others from a hiding place in the woods. Andrej and his younger brother, Tomas take their infant sister and scavenge ruined villages for food and items to sell to get milk for the baby. They ultimately arrive at a small zoo, abandoned except for its animals, a lioness, a monkey, a chamois, a wolf, a boar, a seal, an eagle, a bear, a llama, and a kangaroo. During the children's one night with the animals, the animals share their stories with the children. In the end, the children escape with the animals, or do they? This book is a look at the futility and cruelty of war through a lens of magical realism.

The Summer before the War: a Novel / Helen Simonson 465 pp. (Advance Reader's Edition)

I very much enjoyed this author's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand.  This second novel was still a pleasure, but not quite up to the earlier mark.  Beatrice arrives in Rye in August 1914 to begin teaching Latin at the local grammar school.  She's cautiously accepted into local society by the good-hearted local mover and shaker Agatha Kent and her two nephews Hugh and Daniel.  The hot summer gives way to fall, war is declared, and things happen both silly and serious.  Busybodies gossip and plan a parade; the town takes in seriously traumatized Belgian refugees.  The first 75% of this novel moved extremely slowly and featured what I think of as 'Downton porn,'  that is, great dialogue and period detail without a lot of action.  The last 100 pages finally carried the narrative propulsion of Simonson's earlier novel and made the beginning worth the wait.

Gypsy Boy: My Life in the Secret World of Romany Gypsies / Mikey Walsh 278 p.

This book was fascinating, and horrifying.  Mikey is one of several siblings growing up in a Romany family in southern England, traveling from campsite to campsite in his family trailer.  He vividly describes a childhood that sounds incredibly foreign; most notably the fact that he was only allowed to attend school for a very brief period.  He struggled to meet his culture's and more particularly his father's notions of masculinity; routinely very small boys are trained to box and forced into the ring against vastly larger and stronger boys who are urged to show them no restraint.  Worse, he was the primary target for his father's rage and was regularly beaten.  He was also publicly blasted with a power washer on a daily basis for bedwetting.

While I was perfectly engrossed by this story, by the end I found myself incredulous.  Can he really have been beaten (in his telling, sometimes nearly to death) without ever coming to the attention of the authorities?  In the entire twelve or thirteen year period the book covers, we read of no encounters with the police or social workers.  He describes an elementary school teacher who, when offering him a change of clothes after an accident, discovers that he has been dressed in red lace panties as a punishment and is covered in welts on his legs and backside. She does nothing more than send him home, apparently.  

In sum: kind of an icky reading experience.

The Invisible Ones / Stef Penney 399 p.

An excellent missing persons thriller, and so much more. Ray Lovell is a private investigator of Romany descent hired to find Rose, the wife of the son of a prominent English Romany clan. Told in alternating chapters from the point of view of Ray and JJ Janko, the nephew of Rose's husband, the plot has some amazing twists, including a family curse and a mysterious genetic illness. Like most Americans, I know almost nothing about Romany culture, which added to the interest this book held for me. Strongly recommended.