Please welcome to the blog today’s guest, Alice Stephens!

Alice Stephens’ debut novel, FAMOUS ADOPTED PEOPLE, was published in 2018 by Unnamed Press. Her work has appeared in LitHub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Margins, Banana Writers and other publications. She is a contributing editor to Bloom and writes book reviews and a column, Alice in Wordland, for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Alice’s #read99women pick is Stephanie Allen’s historical novel TONIC AND BALM.

Her rave review: “To discover how our country arrived at this era of climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, measles parties, and a conman in the White House, one only need look back to that unique American phenomenon, the medicine show, which mixed titillating entertainment with sketchy medical advice in order to sell useless balms for illnesses both real and imagined. Stephanie Allen’s fascinating and richly textured novel, TONIC AND BALM, depicts one such troupe, Doc Bell’s Miracles and Mirth Medicine Show, as it travels through Pennsylvania shortly after World War I. The relations in this close-knit community of outcasts are further complicated by racial divisions, as the troupe is comprised of both blacks and whites, including the eponymous Doc Bell, a man of Lincolnesque height who wears a suit of American flags; and the fulcrum of the novel, Antoinette Riddick, AKA Sheba, Queen of the Nile, a sideshow freak put on display for her Elephant Man-like deformity. Stephanie Allen richly renders an America where the marginalized must do everything they can to survive, which often entails exploiting the vulnerable, but also leads to tender displays of mercy, solidarity, and love.”