Reviewed by Mark Massaro
Home of the American Circus
by Allison Larkin
Gallery Books
May 6, 2025
Hardcover, 432 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1668008416
Home of the American Circus, the newest novel by internationally bestselling author Allison Larkin, showcases her distinctive expertise of being able to translate raw human emotion into clear and precise prose, entertaining the reader, while also deeply moving them.
The narrative follows thirty-year-old Freya Arnalds, a troubled bartender living in Maine, as she returns to her hometown of Somers, New York. After a medical emergency leaves her unable to pay her rent, she moves back into her inherited childhood home following the passing of her estranged parents. Needing a safe place to heal, she instead finds the house in a run-down condition and is confronted by Aubrey, her fifteen-year-old, temperamental niece, the only family she regretted leaving, who is now using the empty house as an escape from her own troubled homelife.
Throughout the novel, readers are provided with glimpses into Freya’s dysfunctional childhood and the escalation of events that led to the estrangement from her family. While traditional grief focuses on mourning the loss of the deceased from one’s life, Freya’s return forces her to grieve her own childhood, and the casual and systematic cruelty she endured before her eventual escape from her family. Her parent’s home is like an abandoned museum – dusty and bare while preserving lost memories. Every corner and every room hold triggers that brings her past to her present. Larkin writes:
But I hadn’t noticed until this moment that what’s left of my mother is only fragments. If I remember something she did or said, I might recall the flash of rage in her eyes or the tremble of her cheek, how her voice arched in a way that made me think of a snake rising from its coil. I can catch the faintest hint of the perfume she wore, imagining the scent of honeysuckle and hyacinth until I can almost taste it. But I cannot compile a memory of her as a walking, breathing person. She is always in pieces. The flower print of her dress, the crease in her shoes. She is how she made me feel: persistent unease, a cramp in my throat before tears, the crack of a slamming door echoing in my skull, the searing venom of words chosen carefully for optimal pain (290).
Freya reflects on her parents’ actions, or lack thereof, but never justifies or rationalizes their meanness – abuse is abuse. She knows her experiences and doesn’t second-guess her role in the events that led to her escape.
As Freya’s body slowly heals from the medical emergency that forced her to return, she learns how to break toxic familial patterns through her present-day choices and actions, often involving her wayward niece, as well as her childhood best friend “Jam” (Benjamin), a talented pianist and town butcher; Eddie, a paramedic who has held a crush on Freya since middle school; and Bee, Freya’s middle school friend turned guidance counselor. And slowly through the narrative, these lonely townie misfits’ paths interweave to form a found family, who see and know one another, allowing for a shedding of adolescent labels. Freya muses: “That’s the ultimate unfairness of small towns. You become a character stitched from everyone else’s version of the things that happened to you” (245).
Despite the death of her parents, their presence still actively haunts Freya by way of her half-sister, Steena, the, now upper-class, extension of their mother’s malicious abuse, who seems to dominate everyone she comes across in town through passive-aggressive insults and a forced, perfect smile. While reading, my body tensed up when the signature clacking of Steena’s high heels entered scenes, and I too understood how townies seemed to fumble their words when Steena’s inauthentic geniality was directed at them. Freya says, “Steena always used to explode at me if I said the wrong thing or used the wrong tone. I’m sure Aubrey has experienced that. I don’t want her to be afraid to say anything to me” (298). Each scene carries an undercurrent of nerve-wracking tension because Freya and Steena’s inevitable confrontation could happen at any moment if Freya just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in their small town. Steena operates like a shark just under the water’s surface, always ready to strike to inflict the most damage.
A strength of Larkin’s prose is how clear and vivid the subjective imagery is communicated to the reader. She writes as though she is personally observing the characters and scenery in real time:
We get in the water on the swampy side at the end of Eddie’s yard. Even though the day is warm, the water has been chilling for weeks—the kind of cold that’s hard to ease into. The mud and algae squish through my toes, and I can feel tough roots or snail shells as my feet sink deeper with each step. I used to love this feeling, but now it makes my skin crawl (361).
The characters are fully realized, even the characters that only appear by word-of-mouth between the townies as if they were talking about individuals from our own childhoods. Larkin has the uncanny ability to paint each person in Freya’s orbit as if they were living, breathing figures, complete with their own hopes, flaws, and secrets. Through her vivid descriptions and nuanced dialogue, each character feels indispensable to the story, enriching the tapestry of the small town and making Freya’s world achingly authentic and free from judgement.
Most importantly, Larkin emphasizes the transformative power of acceptance and perseverance in fostering healing. Instead of outrunning her past, Freya absorbs her experiences, becoming more self-actualized. The theme of re-evaluating the past from a fresh perspective is consistently explored through Freya’s journey in the present with occasional chapter breaks of short essay passages she wrote for a high school assignment about the enduring legacy of “Old Bet,” the first circus elephant, and unofficial Somers’ mascot. Reevaluating the historical significance of America’s earliest circuses through the lens of “Old Bet,” the cultivation of considering alternative perspectives is established in young Freya. She says, “It was like someone had given me a new pair of glasses and the world was suddenly so much more interesting. I was having a love affair with my own mind. I wanted to relearn everything I thought I knew” (116). At thirty-years-old, and no longer controlled by her parents, her teachers, or predatory men, Freya cultivates her natural capability to see people for who they truly are, forsaking town gossip or inherited prejudices, and this quality provides her a strength that she, and others, needs.
Allison Larkin’s literary legacy highlights new perceptions of what family means. The People We Keep, her acclaimed 2021 novel, focuses on April, a teenage folk-singing runaway who embarks on a journey of healing from trauma while surviving on the backroads of America. Along the way, she encounters numerous empathetic strangers who profoundly impact her story. But unlike April, Freya must return to her hometown to rediscover the people she left in order to take her life back. A witty, heartfelt, and thoughtful story, Larkin acknowledges that while one cannot control what causes their pain, they do have the agency to decide how to move forward from it.
About the reviewer: Mark Massaro earned a master’s degree in English Language & Literature from Florida Gulf Coast University and he is currently a Professor of English at a state college in Florida. His writing has been published in The Georgia Review, The Hill, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Master’s Review, Newsweek, DASH, Litro, and others.