We Walked the Sky/Lisa Fiedler/290 pages

     We Walked the Sky is a new young adult novel that I picked up mainly because it has a circus setting.  Turns out the story is really one about a teen named Callie who is a tightrope walker until her mother forces her to leave the circus and everything that she believes to be important and worthwhile so that Mom can take a job with endangered animals.  Callie is bitter and is doing a good impression of an "angry young teen" but basically she is disoriented being taken from the only life she has known and is thrust into a high school setting that isn't easy.  New friend Jenna helps but what really gets her through is encouraging notes left behind from her deceased grandmother, Victoria, who ran away from an abusive home to join the circus and found not only a new life but love and family.
     The chapters alternate between Callie and Victoria and the author does a nice job of neatly tying everything together.  I was wishing for a fuller, richer storyline; the characters were not fully developed and the setting (even with a circus tidbit in there) was just too nothing.  I was disappointed but others may feel differently.

The Orphan's Tale/Pam Jenoff/342 pgs.

This book centers around a German circus, during World War II, and an unlikely friendship that develops between two women. Noa is a sixteen year old kicked out by her parents when she becomes pregnant by a German soldier. Astrid, Jewish, marries a German soldier, is divorced by him, and joins the circus that had once been in competition with her family's circus. The story is told in alternating voices between Noa and Astrid. This book is one of the saddest ones I have read, but gives a different insight, though fictitious, into the impact Hitler's regime had on the circus. Recommended.