Roustabout: A Fiction Author: Michelle Chalfoun
	Book Information Publisher: Harpercollins Book Type: Hardcover Rating: 3 ISBN-13: 9780060172978 - ISBN-10: 0060172975 Publication Date: 4/1996 Pages: 223 Book Reviews

Some children dream of joining the circus. Mat dreams of escaping it. Abandoned by her mother when she was five, she was adopted into a traveling circus where the only solace she could find was in her work helping rig the circus tent. Now 15 years old, she has created a family from an odd menagerie of circus hands. There's Al, a hard-drinking cook and one-time transvestite clown; Tante, the costume mistress, whose disfiguring scars run deeper than her skin; and her lover Jayson, the ring crew-chief 20 years her senior. Together they inhabit a peripatetic world of drugs, booze and sex that Mat secretly longs to leave.

Written with the insider savvy of an author who has lived the circus life, Roustabout marks a debut of uncommon impact that readers will not soon forget.