The Little Shadows: Marina Endicott

The Little Shadows by Marina Endicott is a historical novel set in the years preceding and during World War I. It is the story of three sisters, teenagers as the story begins, who travel with their mother to support the family as a vaudeville act. The book is 527 pages long, and that is the first chunkster of that size I have read in over a year.

I often have a difficult time reviewing books I like a lot. I loved this book and it is hard to describe why. I was engaged in the story immediately. I loved the way the author switched back and forth between the sisters (especially) and the mother (occasionally). It took a while for the characters to grow on me, but I enjoyed all of the story telling and the pictures of life in vaudeville.

Through the first half of the book, we follow the sisters in their travails in vaudeville. They all love the life and entertaining people, and I liked that it wasn't a chore for them. If they were tied down in one place for too long, they got bored. In the money or not, they wanted to be entertaining in vaudeville more than anything else.

At around the midpoint of the book, the sisters are all maturing and various aspects of life intrude upon their plans and goals. I don't like to say more than that, but at this point, I was more involved with the characters and pulling for them with their various problems or triumphs in life. This book covers the years from 1912-1917 and thus World War I figures a great deal. That was also a plus for me. I like to learn about wars in a fictional setting.

I am no expert on vaudeville. I have seen vaudeville depicted in movies, although maybe the life was described more glamorously there. We have seen early sound Vitaphone shorts with actors from vaudeville featured, and my husband has several books on the topic. Marina Endicott has done extensive research, as she describes in her acknowledgements and at her website. This book shows the poverty and uncertainty in the vaudeville life for most performers, and how their fortunes may rise or fall based on luck just as easily as talent.

Many of the sections are preceded with quotes that relate to vaudeville and often these quotes come from this book, How to Enter Vaudeville by Frederic LaDelle.

I learned about this book from Moira at Clothes in Books. Her excellent blog has introduced me to several authors, and I am grateful to have experienced this one. See Moira's take on The Little Shadows here and here and here.

This book was written by a Canadian author, and a great deal of it is set in Canada. This book is my 5th book for the Canadian Book Challenge 7. Since I started participating in the Canadian Book Challenge in 2012, I have learned a lot about Canada that I did not know.