'Tonic And Balm' Builds A World In A Bottle
Stephanie Allen's novel creates a microcosm of America in 1919 in the form of a travelling medicine show, packed with people from all walks of life, trying to get along in the show's close confines.
The year is 1919. Doc Bell's Miracle and Mirth Medicine Show — part circus, part sideshow, all charlatanism — travels rural America, trying to gin up enough audience to support the enterprise. The characters in Tonic and Balm, Stephanie Allen's debut novel, are the performers, roustabouts, fixers, and seamstresses who inhabit Doc Bell's self-contained world.
Each chapter of takes a single character or small set of characters to construct the Miracle and Mirth Medicine Show. The book opens with a young black boy, Ephraim
