Gold Medal Independent Publishers Awards IPPY
Bronze Medal 2022 in General Adult Fiction
C.W. Smith’s new novel Girl Flees Circus will inaugurate the Lynn and Lynda Miller Southwest Fiction Series on September 1, 2022. Published by the University of New Mexico Press, the novel opens late in the Roaring '20s, when 19-year-old aviatrix Katie Burke appears out of the blue, crash-landing on the only street of sleepy No Name, New Mexico. Her biplane is upended, and soon, so are the lives of the people she encounters: a handsome young mechanic who lives in a teepee; an 'old maid' schoolteacher who longs for Katie's friendship (and perhaps more); a daringly interracial couple who own the town's diner; a World War I veteran rocked by PTSD; and a bigoted sheriff who has suspicions about the plane -- and the pilot. As her story unfolds, Katie's mysteries deepen, revealing shocking secrets, a scandalous past, and a future in true peril. Girl Flees Circus takes flight the moment Katie crashes to earth, promising a journey into the lives of a glamorous, redheaded stranger and the people she may change forever.
Praise & Reviews & Interviews
“I absolutely loved it. The writing is stellar. The characters stay with you, and the story line is fresh, the dialogue wonderful. I laughed in many places but also felt each character’s regrets and sadness. Hats off for the sensitive treatment of a mixed-race relationship and the discovery of a surprising sexual awakening. Brilliant!”
— Ann Weisgarber author of The Promise, The Glovemaker, The Personal History of Rachel DuPree
“This is a hell of a read. One of the greatest escapes I've enjoyed in years. Girl Flees Circus is the closest you'll come to reinventing your life from an armchair: all new people, fresh observations, wit, intertwining histories from times you wish you'd lived in, and achingly beautiful language.”
— Lisa Schamess author of Borrowed Light
LIBRARY JOURNAL STARRED REVIEW
“VERDICT Smith’s afterword states that this story is based on Amelia Earhart’s forced stopover in Hobbs, NM, in 1928, but award-winning Smith’s playful, entertaining tale surpasses real life with likable, off-center characters in the fading days of slap-dash, swashbuckling aviators. Not to be missed.”
Reviewed by Donna Bettencourt , Sep 30, 2022
AMAZON CUSTOMER REVIEWS
Lynn Hoggard 5.0 out of 5 stars A regional classic.
When nineteen-year-old aviatrix Katie Burke, like a goddess-ex-machina, drops from the sky onto a not-altogether-empty dirt road in No Name, New Mexico, she and the tiny town are changed forever. Part of the fun of this book is watching the six or eight main characters work out their individual destinies as a result of this biplane-cum-asteroid that crashes into their lives.
But what makes the novel lift off the page and soar is the author’s exceptional gift for detail in capturing the characters’ complex and distinctive personalities (e.g.: ”Wally bore a strong… maternal impulse, maybe because, thought Louise, she hadn’t had children or hadn’t had to endure living with one who hates your guts night and day”). That gift is put to masterful use in the development of each of the characters, including their struggles and yearnings, throughout the novel.
The plot holds surprising twists, one of which is watching the inhabitants of No Name come together to create a small, sustaining universe that aids the young, female pilot, from the handsome and brilliant but hapless Leonard, who lives in a teepee, to the rock-steady but internally unmoored black café owner Otis, who bears emotional scars from racist events in his life. The dialogue buoys the plot along like a tailwind, moving it seemingly effortlessly to its inevitable series of conclusions.
Building on such precision of detail in character and sense of place, Girl Flees Circus seems destined to become a regional classic.
Ronald Wetherington 5.0 out of 5 stars You will be consumed by this wonderful small-town post-WWI world.
This is C.W. at his very best: sensitive to character, attentive to details, generous in peeling back emotions. The storytelling is magical: the secret yearnings of each resident of this tiny settlement of "Noname" New Mexico are sweetly exposed by the sudden arrival of a young aviatrix whose bi-wing runs out of fuel. One by one, and in elegant prose, the author moves beyond simple description to invoke the subtle complexities of his characters and make these an empathic part of the reader's own feelings. The authenticity of the setting is complemented by wonderful detail: the magic of a crystal radio, the mechanics of early flight, the intricate dangers of oilfield technology. This short novel is tailor-made for book club discussion!
William Jack Sibley 4 Stars. A true charmer and Hollywood take note!
“Wholly evocative of another time, another place Smith introduces us to a fearless, wholly likable young aviatrix, Katie Burke, who sheds bits and pieces of her tangled past as the page-turner story unfolds. Smith brings bountiful life to a small, early 20th century New Mexico burg, replete with quirky character, salt of the earth provincials and always, thoroughly nailed-it observation. In addition, Smith's mastery of real deal dialogue makes the journey a delight.
A true charmer and Hollywood take note - great film material here!"
Kathleen M. Rodgers
5.0 out of 5 stars Noted author shines spotlight on small town in eastern New Mexico
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 2, 2022
Pretend you’re at the controls of a biplane in the late 1920s. One second you’re flying along over west Texas when you get caught in a thunderstorm, the next you’re crashlanding into the parched burg of No Name, New Mexico. The town residents gather round. What’s more shocking? That you’ve survived the unwieldy landing, or that your sudden presence is the most exciting thing to happen in a town with only one café which happens to have the only telephone?
Or pretend you’re one of the town residents. What’s more shocking, that an aeroplane has come swooping down onto Main Street after clipping a wing on a Model T, or that the pilot climbing out of the cockpit is a tiny young woman with unruly hair?
In his latest novel, Girl Flees Circus, noted author C. W. Smith shines the spotlight on the small dusty fictional town of No Name, New Mexico, located in the southeast corner of the state. It’s refreshing to read a novel set in this region of New Mexico, often the forgotten side of the state when it comes to art and literature. Smith, a longtime Dallas resident, grew up in Hobbs, NM and returns to his roots in this story where a stranger arrives and shakes things up.
It’s also refreshing to read about an unknown aviatrix who wasn’t trying to set a world record when she ended up in a small town that rolled out the “red carpet” and gave her the warmth of friendship and respect she’d hungered for. Kudos also to the author for gifting us with a historical novel that’s relevant with many of the same societal issues we deal with today.
5.0 out of 5 stars Stevo's Best of the Best
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 4, 2022
As Stevo’s Novel Ideas, I am a long-time book reviewer, member of the media, an Influencer, and a content provider. I received this book as a review copy from either the author, the publisher or a publicist. I have not been compensated for this recommendation. I have given it a Best of the Best designation for the month of October, 2022, as it stands heads above other recently published books on this topic.
“This little isolated settlement so far from our urban worlds wouldn't strike us as a place we'd want to live, but it comes completely alive with Katie's arrival, vivid and almost fantasy-like. The inhabitants, fully realized and very recognizable, are ordinary people in an ordinary place that Smith has made seem magical.”
— Jim Sanderson author of El Camino del Rio and Hill Country Property
“Girl Flees Circus is a vacation to a place in the past and one you’ll remember for years to come.”
— Sharon Oard Warner author of Deep in the Heart, and Sophie's House of Cards: a Novel
Read the profile in the Aug. 14, 2022 issue of White Rock Lake Weekly
http://whiterocklakeweekly.com/authors-sense-of-community-runs-deep/
Also here: White Rock Lake Weekly profile
Read the D magazine profile in the Sept. 22 issue.
Lone Star Review: Girl Flees Circus
August 27, 2022
High-flying entertainment in a down-to-earth tale
In Dallas writer C.W. Smith’s enticing new novel, Girl Flees Circus, a sleepy, isolated hamlet suddenly is knocked out of its doldrums by a dramatic event. One day in the late 1920s, an out-of-fuel biplane suddenly crash-lands in the middle of the only road leading into No Name (that’s its name), New Mexico, a tiny settlement that has not yet gotten electricity or telephones. The plane narrowly misses a Model T Ford driven by the local schoolteacher, Mabel Cross, and incurs some damage both from its rough landing and from Leonard, an awkward young handyman, who accidentally tears some holes in the biplane’s fabric while trying to help the pilot he assumes is male.
The flier is female, a 19-year-old aviatrix named Katie Burke. She has suffered some minor injuries. But some of the gathered locals insist they can take care of her wounds, fix her plane, and keep her entertained until the county sheriff comes around in the near future. They are quite curious to know more about this daring young woman who has glided down from the sky.
When Katie tries to apologize for the trouble she has caused them, Mabel Cross is quick to tell her: “Well, whatever trouble you might be, we’re inclined to call excitement.” Leonard, the 18-year-old handyman, quickly develops “a case of heartthrob.” And later, Howard, a stern World War I veteran, has to face his hard feelings about his estranged daughter, Isabel, after his wife, Louise, sews up Katie’s cuts and lets her wear some of Isabel’s clothes. Others try to help, as well, not yet aware that Katie is in trouble for real.
In a fit of anger at a pilot she thought would marry her, she took off in the biplane without permission and now has flown it all the way from North Carolina, making numerous stops while hoping to reach California and find her father. After crossing West Texas, she hit a storm just inside New Mexico, ran out of fuel, and had nowhere to land except No Name. Katie also has arrived with something of a checkered past. She has grown up in an air-circus family, now separated. Her mother is a wing-walker who took off with another air-circus performer. And her father is an often-drunk pilot who has flown barnstorming aerobatics. He taught Katie to fly at age fifteen and then took her with him to handle his airmail routes and other aerial assignments when he was too hungover to work the controls.
Katie’s history, her snap decision to head out on her own, and her fortitude all intrigue other characters in Smith’s new book. They begin, in different ways, to realize that they, too, can change their lives. And the choices they make for themselves become a key part of this absorbing, entertaining novel.
Girl Flees Circus is also a spirited salute to the exploits and courage of “the aviatrixes of the 1910s and 1920s,” C.W. Smith notes in his book’s afterword. Smith grew up in Hobbs, New Mexico, and heard tales that Amelia Earhart had made an emergency landing on a Hobbs road in 1928 and spent the night there while attempting her first coast-to-coast flight. “Like many Americans,” he writes, “I grew up thinking Amelia Earhart was the only notable woman pilot in the twentieth century, her fame solidified by her doomed effort at flying around the globe and the mystery of its end.” But, by one count taken in 1930, Smith notes, some two hundred women had earned pilot’s licenses. “My protagonist, Katie Burke, is quick to let her people know that she is only one among many.”
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST WITH INTERVIEWER SHEREE GLADDEN ON KSJE’S “WRITE ON FOUR CORNERS.” WRITE ON FOUR CORNERS
Appeared in the digital edition of The Dallas Morning News Aug 30, 2022
In ‘Girl Flees Circus,’ a scrappy aviatrix causes a stir in a small New Mexico town
Dallas author C.W. Smith mines the early age of flight for his light-hearted escapade.
Dallas author C.W. “Charlie” Smith's 10th novel, "Girl Flees Circus," is about a barnstorming aviatrix who runs out of fuel and makes a bumpy landing in fictional NoName, N.M.
Dallas author C.W. “Charlie” Smith has done a lot in his life, and his experiences — as roustabout, frame carpenter and roofer, newspaper reporter, musician, longtime SMU English professor, award-winning writer and more — inform his 10th novel, a delightful yarn called Girl Flees Circus.
Though it’s set in the frontier of nearly a century ago, Smith’s fictional hamlet is a thoroughly recognizable piece of the Southwest, and its people feel like neighbors you might know.
As the tale begins in 1928, there’s nothing in the way of entertainment in tiny NoName, N.M., a wide spot in the road somewhere near Hobbs. So, when a small Wright Whirlwind J5 biplane runs out of fuel and makes a bumpy landing on NoName’s southbound stretch of the Carlsbad road — well, that’s real excitement.
When the barnstorming pilot turns out to be a scrappy but vulnerable strawberry-blond teenager named Katie, the town is instantly fascinated by, and curious about, “our aviatrix.” But only gradually do both townspeople and Smith’s readers learn the reason for that revealing verb in the book’s title.
Girl Flees Circus has its gritty moments and some dark edges, yes. But at its heart, Smith’s cinematic storytelling carries great warmth and energy, with an enduring optimism in the possibilities of reinvention that is as American as the sunny Southwest itself.
*******
Q: Where did your idea for a barnstorming 1920s aviatrix come from?
A: I heard a story growing up in Hobbs, N.M., that Amelia Earhart made an emergency landing on the town’s one street in 1928, and it understandably caused a big stir. The story sat in my memory for decades before I corroborated it with research. But that made me realize there were many others worthy of the attention, and, in the end, I found a fictional young woman aviator in Katie Burke as a stand-in for all.
Q: You spent an important part of your youth in Hobbs, and this is not the first time the state has appeared in your historical fiction. How is New Mexico’s appeal different from other Southwestern settings that you’ve used, such as Oklahoma and your native Texas?
A: Actually, to me they’re the same. The New Mexico I grew up in looks like West Texas — flat, dry, spare, cotton and oil country. Crews I worked on might be at a well site in Texas in the morning and New Mexico in the afternoon. Texas was on Central time, and we were on Mountain. So we said, “Be there 9 Texas time,” or “Hobbs time.” The state border in my mind was temporal, not spatial.
Q: The plot of Girl Flees Circus reminds me a bit of what we used to refer to as “a caper.” It seems noticeably more light-hearted than many of your previous novels, which sometimes have explored the bleaker territories of the human heart. Did you set out to write an escapade?
A: Interesting! Yes, it is lighter-hearted. I was happy for those characters, happy to see each wind up with a bit of what they wanted or needed by the end. The story seemed to evolve into that tone.
Q: Do you think the decade of the 1920s has a nostalgic appeal for us because of its coming just after the Great War but before the Depression and the nightmares of World War II? I think of it as the decade belonging to my grandparents, who were then young adults, having babies and planning for a future they could not possibly have imagined.
A: To me, the ‘20s kicked off what I think of as “domestic modernity.” In the rural West, that meant telephones, municipal water and sewage, electricity, public libraries and schools, paved streets. In the novel, Arabella Bohanan is determined to bring this about in NoName, and young Leonard’s passion for electronics marks him as forward-looking. When my aviatrix Katie Burke crash-lands her biplane, he’s not so surprised: “He’d felt all along that he was arriving into adulthood on the breast of a coming wave. The future held undiscovered marvels, and he was eager to encounter them. ... So, the appearance of this aircraft today ... was like a prophecy fulfilled, the arrival of a moving outer boundary of the future, the way water spreads across a floor.”
Q: Was there any one character in this book you especially liked or with whom you particularly identified?
A: Oh, I think I have a soft spot for lovelorn young fellows like Lennie, Jason Sanborn in Steplings, and Jimbo in Understanding Women. But the wonderful thing about writing and reading fiction is that it gives you the chance to occupy someone else’s head and heart and space for a while. I wouldn’t say “escape” because that has a negative connotation, but rather “expansion” of your perspective. So I tend to “identify” with whichever character whose point of view I’m seeing the story from. Or maybe “stand in sympathy with and listen to” is maybe better than “identify.”
Q: You seem to have made a study of vintage aircraft and acquired a certain amount of technical know-how about the skill and training it takes to fly such a plane. How did you come by all the aviation details in Girl Flees Circus — via experience in the air, or by research and expert advice?
A: I was always interested in aviation. I built model planes and have a collection of toy airplanes. But the novel’s details come from reading and talking to pilots. Earhart wrote a lot about her experiences, as did others. Faulkner’s novel Pylon gave me a picture of the life of the barnstormers of the period, and I trust his details, as he was one. But in truth, my knowledge is pretty shallow and fleeting on the subject.
Girl Flees Circus
By C.W. Smith
(University of New Mexico Press, 216 pages, $19.95)
Meet the author
The official in-store launch event for Girl Flees Circus will be at Deep Vellum Books, 3000 Commerce St., Dallas, on Sept. 14 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Author C.W. Smith will sign books and converse with former Dallas Morning News Metro columnist Steve Blow.
On Oct. 5 at 6 p.m., Interabang Books will welcome author C.W. Smith for an in-store book signing and reader chat about Girl Flees Circus. The store is at 5600 W. Lovers Lane, No. 142, Dallas.
For more information, visit cwsmiththeauthor.com.
HEAR THE INTERVIEW - WITH KZSM’S PRISCILLA VAN LEDER ON HER SHOW BOOKMARKED
Review of Girl Flees Circus in the Historical Novel Society Issue #93
REVIEW BY KATE BRAITHWAITE
When Katie Burke crash lands her biplane in the tiny town of Noname, New Mexico, her arrival is a catalyst for change for several of the inhabitants who rush to her aid. It’s the late 1920s. Noname has no hotel and only one main street, but it does boast a school and a lonely schoolmistress, Mabel, and the Owl Café run by Otis Jefferson, rumored to have been born a slave, and a younger white woman, Wally, who may or may not be his wife. Katie also meets Howard and his wife Louise, a couple paralyzed for the past three years after Howard’s teenage daughter ran away from home, and Leonard, a handsome young man with a talent for fixing things. Katie’s arrival shakes up these warmly rendered, complex characters and as the story behind her sudden appearance is revealed, her new friends find themselves protecting her, even as she plans to move on and leave them behind.
Girl Flees Circus is a literary, character-driven tale that evokes past times and societal injustices with subtlety and finesse. Each character grows and changes as the story unfolds, and C.W. Smith blends sharp dialogue and interior monologue to bring each person to vivid life on the page. Humorous, optimistic, moving, and believable, Girl Flees Circus portrays an America full of hard work and struggle, but also invention, hope, and human kindness. It should appeal to fans of Lynda Rutledge’s West with Giraffes.
INTERVIEW WITH C.W. SMITH IN FEB. 23 ISSUE OF ALBUQUERQUE the MAGAZINE
