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Book: “Boy With Wings” by Mark Mustian
Publishing Info: Koehler Books, March 2025
Where Did I Get This Book: I received an ARC from the publicist.
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: What does it mean to be different? From Mark Mustian, founder of the Word of South Festival of Literature and Music and award-winning author of the international bestseller “The Gendarme,” comes the new Southern gothic novel, “Boy With Wings”.
Johnny Cruel is born with strange appendages on his back, frightening his neighbors and leaving him struggling to find a home. Johnny ends up in a “freak show” traveling the 1930s South, where he bares his back to onlookers who come to gape and fawn. Is he a horror or an angel? Should he hide himself to live his life?
As Johnny comes to grips with his uniqueness, he embarks on a journey of love and finds the miracles that give our lives meaning. Mustian’s thrilling and emotional story of self-discovery is perfect for book clubs and fans of historical fiction.
Review: Thank you to Books Forward for sending me an ARC of this novel!
Though I fell off watching “American Horror Story” awhile ago (I think the last season I watched was “1984”), one of my favorite seasons (along with “Coven” and “Hotel”) is “Freakshow”. It was such an interesting topic to cover a freak show traveling in the American South in a post-WWII era, letting us get to know the characters and seeing the complexities within their characters and the abuses that they faced from society. I have always enjoyed a story like this, and when “Boy With Wings” ended up in the inbox I was absolutely interested in giving it a go because of that. A kid named Johnny Cruel comes of age with wing-like deformities after loss and trauma, finding his place in a traveling carnival? Why yes, that does suit my fancy!
The reason this book was so enticing to me was because of the carnival/freak show factor, as the history of traveling carnivals and freak shows is SO fascinating to me. Look, I’m the gal who absolutely loves a story about a band of freaks in a freak show BECAUSE of the idea of Othering, dehumanization, and so called ‘freaks’ finding companionship and community against the odds and the prejudices of society. And I thought that this aspect of the book was great, with Johnny becoming a star due to his deformities, feeling like he belongs even though he is being exploited by leader Tiny Tot as she makes money off of his oddities. I loved the way that Mustian shows the tenuous connections that Johnny had with other members of the circus, be it Tiny Tot’s daughter Winifred, with whom he falls in love , or Sheila, who takes him under her wing and is ultimately punished for it. I also just loved the depiction of the Great Depression Era, and felt that we got a good sense for the time and place with the hardships that everyone was feeling, especially the Black people in the Jim Crow South. Though this does lead to some very difficult to deal with moments, including racism, ableism, violence, and misogyny, all of which is depicted pretty honestly here, so know that this book definitely comes with a lot of trigger warnings.
I will say, however, that there were some structural choices that took me a bit out of the book as I was reading it. For one, we had some pretty big time jumps that split the story into different parts, and some pretty big gaps in Johnny’s experiences. Given that it was implied in at least one of these time jumps there were some pretty big developments, I was a little bummed that we didn’t get to spend as much time in these segments of his life. I don’t usually need things spelled out for me TOO much when there are time jumps, but in this book I think that the character development could have been strengthened if we had delved a little bit more, especially in that time between his time at the work camp and the traveling carnival. And along with that we had a structure that would flip flop between a third person Johnny chapter, and then a first person perspective chapter of one of the players in his life during that time. I liked the Johnny chapters just fine because it felt consistent, but the first person perspectives were hit or miss, compounded by the fact that each person only got one shot at it. Had the characters all popped a bit more or felt fully fleshed out it could have worked better, but some were interesting (Elias and Winifred stood out) while others were a bit flat.
If we had stayed with the freak show for the majority or even all of the story this would have worked better for me, but that being said I really enjoyed the time and place and themes of found family and coming of age in “Boy With Wings”.
Rating 7: A bittersweet historical fiction fantasy about an outsider looking for his place in difficult times. I do wish the pacing hadn’t been as choppy as it was with the time jumps and multiple perspectives, however.
Reader’s Advisory:
“Boy With Wings” isn’t on any Goodreads lists as of now, but it would fit in on “Circus/Carnival Books”.
The Library Ladies 