Circus Mirandus by Cassie Beasley (review)

Grandpa Ephraim, who has raised Micah Tuttle for most of his ten years, is dying, but he can’t go in peace until he claims a miracle promised to him by the Lightbender, a magician in a mysterious circus Ephraim attended in his youth. Micah has been hearing stories of the wondrous Circus Mirandus all his life, and he believes that that the Lightbender will restore the old man to health and thereby send Ephraim’s officious sister Gertrudis—Micah’s resented and resentful guardianin-waiting—packing. With the help of a skeptical schoolmate, Jenny, Micah does find the circus and share his grandfather’s awe, but the miracle Grandpa brokers with the Lightbender isn’t quite the one Micah wants, even though it’s exactly the one he needs. The tender relationship between grandfather and grandson is delicately drawn, and the family backstory, with its ties to a dark episode in the millennia-old history of Circus Mirandus, is intriguing. Monochromatic illustrations are painterly but robust, neatly enclosing their drama in bordered vignettes. At the core of Beasley’s debut novel is the theme of eternal life explored in Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, and readers will sense the rightness of Grandpa Ephraim’s final request even as they share Micah’s reluctance to let the ailing man go the way he lived—caring for his grandson to the very end.