Chad Hanna

xi, 548 pp. "Walter Edmonds' Chad Hanna was originally published in 1940 (after first having been published in serial form in the Saturday Evening Post under the title "Red Wheels Rolling".) It was something of a best seller in its day, enough so that it was made into a movie that same year with Henry Fonda and Dorothy Lamour. Chad Hanna, the title character, is a young man of about twenty with no particular direction or ambition, whose life is abruptly changed when Huguenine's Great And Only International Circus comes to the tiny village of Canastota, New York, in 1837. In quick succession, Chad finds himself becoming infatuated with the circus' beautiful equestrienne, helping a runaway slave, having to flee from a jealous husband, by which course he ends up joining Huguenine's circus as it hits the road, along with a girl named Caroline he got in trouble when he used her to trick her slave-catcher father. With Huguenine's Chad and Caroline find new lives, Chad starting as a roustabout and Caroline showing a budding talent as a top-rider. The novel gives the reader an intimate look at what life was like for a small circus making its way from town to town in horse-drawn wagons in 1830's America, having to contend with everything from bad weather to bad roads, tempermental performers, rowdy audiences, romantic entanglements, a sick lion, and competition from a bigger and ruthless competing circus, Burke & Walsh." --Whitt Pond