Under the Radar Book Club Pick
The Tumbling Turner Sisters by Juliette Fay (S&S/Gallery Books; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) is the latest Costco book club pick. Published last year in hardcover, the trade paperback, with a new cover, arrives on January 3.
The January, 2017 issue of COSTCO Connection, summarizes the novel, which is set in 1919 when character Frank Turner is out of work and “his resourceful wife and four daughters take their tumbling act on the road, leaving their upstate New York home to join the vaudeville circuit.”
PW says that the women’s “lively personalities bring to life Fay’s outlandishly enjoyable premise. With humor, affection, ambition, and a talent for weaving in history, Fay brings the world of 1910s vaudeville vividly to life.”
RT writes “Readers who delight in books set around the 1920s or feature the theater will adore Fay’s spunky coming-of-age tale. Told in the alternating voices of two of the four sisters, this wonderfully evocative story charms readers.”
Fay has a direct connection, as the book video makes clear. She is the great-granddaughter of a vaudevillian herself.
The novel has largely flown under the radar since it came out in hardback last June and is the first work of historical fiction from an author better known for her women’s fiction titles such as The Shortest Way Home (PRH/Penguin, 2012).