ELEPHANT DREAMS
by
MARTHA DEERINGER
Genre: Young Adult / Historical Fiction / Sweet Romance
Publisher: Melange Books
Date of Publication: September 2, 2017
Number of Pages: 224
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Desperate to escape her squalid life on the streets of New York City, sixteen-year-old Fiona Finn seeks help at the magnificent Church of the Ascension where Charles Loring Brace, a social reformer horrified by the plight of New York City’s street children, arranges for her to go west aboard an Orphan Train.
Fiona’s homeless, alcoholic father has other plans, however. He wants Fiona to “work” the streets to support his drinking and pursues her across the midwest until she is forced to abandon the train in Houston to avoid a sheriff bent on returning her to her father.
Alone in the dark on the Texas prairie, Fiona’s terrifying experience with a circus elephant, Bolivar, sets the stage for a future she could never have imagined.
PRAISE FOR ELEPHANT DREAMS:
Elephant Dreams will be featured in the January, 2018 issue of the Historical Novel Society magazine.
“What a story! With scenes to be likened to any Charles Dickens novel, the author, Martha Deeringer, carries the reader on a breathtaking journey through despair and hope that changes as often as the wind changes direction. Great characters, a believable story, an insight into another world, and an empathy for a character that a reader would have to have a heart of stone not to sympathise with. Although billed as a young adult story, this will readily appeal to an adult reader. Very visual writing and the makings of a classic.”
- Jane Finch for Readers’ Favorite
“I absolutely adored this novel; I couldn't find a single thing to dislike about it, other than of course the characters we are meant to dislike. The secondary characters were just as well rounded as the primary characters, leaving the reader with a feeling of contentment at the end of the novel. Each character brought his or her own three-dimensional personality to the novel, giving me a reason to either love or hate them passionately.”
- Acwoolet for Online Book Club
- Jane Finch for Readers’ Favorite
“I absolutely adored this novel; I couldn't find a single thing to dislike about it, other than of course the characters we are meant to dislike. The secondary characters were just as well rounded as the primary characters, leaving the reader with a feeling of contentment at the end of the novel. Each character brought his or her own three-dimensional personality to the novel, giving me a reason to either love or hate them passionately.”
- Acwoolet for Online Book Club
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Afterword from Elephant Dreams
By Martha Deeringer
Mollie Arline Kirkland Bailey, the “Circus Queen of the Southwest” was one of the best-known and most beloved women in Texas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Described as a woman of “great charm and quick wit” she seemed most interested in making others happy.
After her marriage to James A. (Gus) Bailey in 1858, the couple formed the Bailey Family Troupe with Mollie’s sister, Fanny, and Gus’s brother, Alfred, and traveled on a riverboat through Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas dancing, singing, and acting in short skits. The Bailey’s would eventually have nine children; the first, a daughter, Dixie, was born on the riverboat.
When the Civil War broke out, Gus served in Hood’s Texas Brigade and Mollie, leaving Dixie with friends in Richmond, Virginia, traveled with them as a nurse. Some say she also served as a spy for Generals John Bell Hood and Jubal A. Early, disguising herself as an old woman and selling cookies in the enemy camp as she searched for information. In her later years, Mollie admitted that she had once carried desperately needed medicines to a Confederate camp, passing through enemy lines with the packets of medicine concealed inside her famous pompadour hairdo.
In 1879, the Bailey’s traded their showboat for a small circus, which found immediate success in Texas as the Bailey Circus, “A Texas Show for Texas People.”
When Gus became too ill to travel with the circus and retired to the Bailey’s winter home in Blum, Texas, it was renamed the Mollie A. Bailey Show.. The circus flew the flags of the United States, the state of Texas, and the Confederacy over the big top.
Gus Bailey died in 1896, but Mollie, known to nearly everyone as “Aunt Mollie,” continued in the business. In 1906, the circus switched to railroad travel, and Aunt Mollie often entertained governors, senators, military officers, and other important guests in her newly appointed parlor car.
During that same year, Mollie married A. H. (Blackie) Hardesty. Much younger than Mollie, Blackie managed the circus gaslights. During this time, Mollie showed the first motion pictures in Texas in a separate tent.
When her youngest child, Birda, died in 1917, Mollie ran the circus from home until her own death the following year. The one-ring circus was said to have had thirty-one wagons and over two hundred animals at its height, including camels and elephants.
For many years after the demise of the Mollie Bailey Circus, people would exclaim when they heard a loud noise that it was “louder than Mollie Bailey’s calliope.
Martha Deeringer lives with her husband and their large, extended family on a central Texas cattle ranch. She writes magazine articles, often about history, for children and adults and is a frequent contributor to regional and national magazines.
Martha also writes Young Adult fiction, occasionally inspired by her teaching experiences or the antics of her children and grandchildren. She loves ranch life and sometimes abandons her writing to cope with assorted issues involving kids, dogs, cats, horses, orphan calves, and occasionally armadillos, coyotes and rattlesnakes.
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