I had thought this book was historical fiction, but it was more of fiction than realistic or historical. I’m a huge lover of historical fiction and the Midwest has to be one of my fave time periods so I enjoyed being thrown back into it.

The style of writing is something special, it takes a while to get into and you either like it or not. My big criticism of the book is the way it went down the travelling show route with Yip being a mute - I feel it's been done to death and it was a little too obvious. Parrick, he was not one to waste his words but spoke of my demise as plainly as of some turn in the weather. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.It also took me a little while to get used to the fact that the author doesn’t use quotation marks in conversations and the chapters are very very short (which is why there are 90+ chapters). I love the compelling narrator… somehow a cross between Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and Charles Portis's Mattie Ross.

A rollicking, page-turning wild west adventure, populated by a cast of arresting grotesques, with luminous imagery and an unforgettable protagonist. Once you get used to it, it reads very easily though - it is very consistently maintained throughout the novel. Overall I’m glad I read this book and I enjoyed it, but I don’t feel inclined to read it again or recommend it to everyone I know.And, as Yip and Dud's odyssey takes them further into the unknown - via travelling shows, escaped slaves and the greed of gold-hungry men - the pull of home only gets stronger. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. But while there are pleasures (and horrors too) in this picaresque of a plot, its real power lies in Yip’s distinctive voice. Yip survived but he was mute, not a sound left his mouth from the day he was born, he was also extremely tiny in stature, and didn’t have a single hair on his body.