The Book of Speculation

Author Erika Swyler has used her extensive imagination to create the history of the Simon Watson's family.  Simon Watson is a young librarian living in a small beach town on the Long Island Sound. He is living alone in the house he and his sister grew up in.  His parents have died and his sister moved out. The story begins with the house crumbling around him as he is let go from his job as a research librarian due to budget cuts.  He is unable to find the funds to fix up the house and he is contemplating leaving town himself.

Involved in a romantic relationship with Alice, the girl next door, he feels unable to borrow the money to repair the house from her father, but Frank McAvoy seems intent on keeping the house in one piece.

Then one day a mysterious book arrives.  It is the diary and log of a traveling circus that seems to have faced an unfortunate end.  Simon's mother was a mermaid in a traveling circus before the children were born and his sister, Enola has gone off with a modern day traveling carnival.
In the book Simon finds mention of names he remembers his mother mentioning.  This sets him doing what he does best, researching the characters in the book and finding out family secrets that have been hidden for generations.

When his sister announces she is coming for a visit and shows up with her electric performer boyfriend all the cards are now on the table and the pieces of the family history start to fall into place. Past and present start of come together and it is up to Simon to find out the common thread between the book and the Watson family.

In a story of parallels between Simon's modern day family tribulations and the historic traveling circus the reader gets the flavor of what it was like to travel with those 18th century circuses. Throughout the book there are also crude pictures and descriptions of the Tarot card readings, interesting to those who are intrigued by the psychic, spiritual world.

Written in similar fashion to Marisha Pessl's Night Film, and The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman, Erika Swyler has written a wonderful novel about the power of books, magic and families.