Description
Just before daybreak the old lioness stirs in her bed of sweet clover hay under the low eaves of her wooden stall Her anguished bellow shakes me awake, rockets over the caved-in giraffe barn, and cannonballs out across the vacant winter meadow. Monumenta!
Queen of the veld. Every morning I come back from Africa-foot by cheek. leg by arm, stiff as icicles, nose red-to the blue-brown, ice-patched emptiness of Indiana.
To the accompaniment of this passionately cadenced prose we step into the world of Ada Cunningham, teenage runaway and traveling musician.
Her compelling narrative is richly plotted with a Dickensian array of unforgettable characters, while it explores aesthetic dilemmas central to all creativity Ada's distinctive voice, to which the reader is instantly bonded, flashes back to childhood introducing her eccentric father, Reynard, a concert violinist, and her mother Grace, human interest reporter on their small town paper
Mysteriously blinding themselves to the handicaps with which their daughter is born, Ada's parents see for her a future filled with musical virtuosity, an uncertain destiny which readers will be impelled to discover.
When bizarre occurrences find Ada the pawn in a vicious custody battle fought with Grace's wicked sister Edlyn, her story leaps into flight and the adventures, by turns humorous and desperate, of a huckstering musician. She comes to rest in the safe harbor of a circus colony, calling herself "Norma." and playing calliope for the resident troupe.
Here she is sheltered by Belle, once a trapeze flyer, now keeper of the regal lioness, Monumenta: Popcorn Joe, and Alexander Sandler, wandering Jew, klezmer, and trumpeter extraordinaire In the darkened rehearsal barn, at the keyboard of the steam calliope, with the spider monkey Scaddegood musing nearby.
Ada composes the suite that promises to create from her pain a meaning that transcends suffering and gives birth to art . . . .
