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Book Snob – The Carny by Brooke Moss
The Carny by Brooke Moss
At a town fair on the coast of Oregon, handsome Native American carny, Vincent Youngblood, bestows an unforgettable kiss on shy, awkward teenager, Charlotte Davenport. Then he disappears without another word, leaving her baffled and enamored.
Ten years later, Charlotte is still living in the small fishing town of Astoria, while being trained to–reluctantly–take over for her philandering hotelier father when he retires. After all, who else will do it? Her two perfect sisters are busy being married to their flawless husbands and having cookie cutter children, while Charlotte remains single, childless, and every bit as mousy as she was a decade ago.
As Charlotte struggles to climb out from underneath her judgmental parents thumb, the carnival rolls back into town, and Charlotte finds herself face to face with Vin again. He’s back to run his father’s carnival, walking away from a promising career in medicine he started in Chicago. Will her biased and judgmental family accept her relationship with a man who is not only a Native American, but works as a carny for a living? And what unsavory secrets bind the well-educated and seemingly superlative Vin to that ramshackle carnival?
After all, you can’t judge a carny by its cover.
DISCLAIMER: I received an ARC of this book as a part of the author’s promotional blog tour.
The Carny is a delightful read. Super fun, fast and well written. The dialogue flows easily and funny and the characters are familiar. The Carny is a sweet read that makes you fall in love with the possibility that men like Vincent Youngblood could possibly exist. He’s funny, charming, handsome and totally climbable. Through the whole book I wanted to just vault up him like a rope ladder.
Set in the Pacific Northwest, Moss has built a world that is believable and complete. Set in Astoria, Oregon, a small fishing town, Charlotte Davenport is the black sheep in her perfectly uppercrust family. Moss paints an amazingly accurate picture of the kind of small town snobbery that goes on amongst the affluent. The running joke of “I’m not racist! I gave to this or that charity just three years ago!” cracked me up throughout the book. She captures the kind of narrow focused thinking that so many American’s suffer from. Amazingly, Moss manages to keep from making her characters the butt of their own jokes and finds something special and human about each of them.
The plot of the story is based around the love at first sight/fated pairing of Charlotte and Vincent Youngblood who she meets as a teen at the local carnival. Their meeting and later reconnection flows like a perfect dream. Exactly the way love should be. Overall I found The Carny to be fantastic. The quick turnaround of Charlotte’s mother’s behavior was a little out of character and hard to swallow, but other than that I found the pacing and story to be great.
Perfect for a summer read, you’ll devour The Carny and fall in love with Vincent Youngblood.
My first kiss was in a tumbledown old cinema – I can’t even remember anyone else being there it was a flee pit! We went to see That’ll Be the Day,starring David Essex, which is quite apt for this book because it too is the story of a carny! I remember my boyfriends arm creeping over my shoulder first and eventually he leaned over and kissed me. I must say, I wasn’t too sure about this but it seemed like the done thing! Enjoyed the film!
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My first kiss – I honestly don’t remember it. Or who it was with. How sad is that? I know I had one somewhere along the way. I believe it was a closed mouth thing with the boy I dated in Jr. high Chris Hill. Obviously it was not memorable. Of course, as time has flown by the only kisses I remember anymore are from my beloved husband of 16 years. All else has been lost with the tide of so many other memories which are merely wisps of images of boys before.