The Final Confession of Mabel Stark

by Robert Hough

A fictionalized autobiography tells about the life, loves, and adventures of Mabel Stark, the greatest female tiger trainer in circus history.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical, Book Club, Animals, Adult Fiction, The United States Of America

430 pages, Hardcover

First published May 29, 2001

About the author

Toronto author, bon-vivant, family man, spelunking enthusiast. My seventh novel, The Marriage of Rose Camilleri, was published in November of 2021.

Reviews

[Melki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is the rip-roaring tale of Mabel Stark, the greatest female tiger tamer of all time. Though this book is fiction, Mabel was a real woman. A few photos of her are featured, including one showing her favorite tiger leaping onto her back, a show stopping act that drew screams from circus crowds all over the country.

Though Mabel had a way with animals, she had fairly lousy taste in men, including a first husband who had her committed to a mental institution. She literally ran away to join the circus and after a few years as a dancing girl, found her true calling working with the big cats.

This is not a book for the squeamish as the author goes into great detail, and by great I mean "excrutiatingly grisly" detail, about Mabel's many maulings. Also discussed are the various methods of wound care. The word "suppuration" is used frequently. Ick.

The book bears some similarity to Water for Elephants in that it is a fascinating look at life during the golden age of the circus, but skips the cloying love story that I hated about Sara Gruen's book.

A thoroughly fun, page-turning read, Hough manages to capture the excitement, the flash, dazzle and razzmatazz of a life spent under the big top.

[Cher 'N Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars - It was great. I loved it.

I always enjoy historical fiction more when it is based on real people or events and this one was no exception. The author took a lot of liberties with the numerous unknown parts of Mabel’s life, creating such a memorable and unique story in the process.
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First Sentence: He is tall, knobby-kneed, thin as a quarter pole, in his shop on Seventh Street, craned over his tailoring bench, applying white piping to a vest, when the pain in his lower right abdomen becomes a searing white-hot agony.

[Aimee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lions, and tigers, and men...oh my! After reading this book, I swear I was going to join the circus and tame tigers myself. A historical fiction (of sorts) follows the love life and career of Miss Mable Stark. She is beyond her time with independed furvior and has an often comedic interpretation of romance. Her true love(s) are her cats, whom have sent her dangerously close to her death bed on more than one occasion. In addition in and out of the ring with her cats she struggles with a countries shift in interests from the star-studded railroad express of tent shows to big city entertainment.

[Nic · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm about halfway through and only really started caring about the character around page 200. I think this novel is shackled by the author doing too much research and trying to include it all instead of getting in deeper touch with the character's emotions. Even though Mabel is brash on the outside, since it's told in first-person, I'd expect to see more vulnerability, especially given what she lives through in the first two chapters.

The sex scenes, which are plentiful, are also distracting and feel as if written by a man, not a woman - meaning there's a lack of authenticity there. It's laugh-out-loud bewildering in places.

Despite this, it is a novel about circus life in the 1900s - 1930s and the subject matter interests me enough to keep me reading on. You can learn a lot by reading books that aren't wholly successful and I'm sure I'll make it to the end.

HAVING FINISHED:
I think this novel is a lesson in how 1) deciding to stick to the facts of a person's life can keep your book from being as good as it could be and 2)that a "larger than life" character might be best viewed by someone else, rather than cast as a first person narrator.

[Blaine DeSantis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly enjoyable novel based on the true life Tiger trainer, Mabel Stark. Lots of good stuff about the circus and her unusual life and marriages.

[Almeta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tried to verify the earlier life of Mabel as depicted in The Final Confession of Mabel Stark. An autobiography of Mabel Stark called Hold That Tiger was written, however it is generally thought to be released only to promote the circus, and likely written by the Ringling Press Department and not Mabel at all. I could not find any reference to its contents telling of her earlier life. Copies of the book are selling for $200.00 to $500.00. Available inter-loan libraries will not loan their copy. So I am not likely to actually read it.

Mabel, it is said, embellished her life in interviews and rarely told the same story about her birth, adolescence and young adult life. Her later professional life is well documented, intertwined with that of the circuses and animal exhibits that employed her. There is some evidence that she had intended to write her own story. She “hired” a ghost writer, writer Earl Chapin May, and corresponded with him about segments of her life. This book did not materialize, but the letters remain.

This gives Robert Hough the freedom to speculate on the earlier life of Mabel and on her actual thoughts and feelings. I like his version; in fact I thought it to be the most interesting section of the book. Carnivals and circuses did recruit Roustabout and Carnies from drunk tanks and insane asylums, although generally taking men. I wonder if this gave Hough the idea to include a mental institution as part of Mabel’s life. A husnanbandly incarceration of a non-responsive and un-reproductive wife was, unfortunately not unheard of at the time. I also like the Tennessee/Kentucky drawl of her brash voice and her blithe approach to sex. Some people are claiming this to be irreverent and pornographic.

I admit that I think Mabel Stark was a remarkable woman. I have to remember though, just like The Aviator's Wife, that the expressed thoughts and emotions in this novel are, just that, novel and fictionalized. Although the circus life is interesting, I became tired of descriptions of every whistle stop and whip crack that made up Mabel’s life.

[Gillian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a book club choice and I would probably never have read it or even picked it up otherwise. Even if I had read the back cover I doubt it would have made it to the till. Which just goes to show that you shouldn't judge a book .... is very true as I quite enjoyed it.

A fictionalisation of the the life of Mabel Stark circus performer and tiger tamer. Whilst circuses quite rightly no longer have wild animal acts Mabel was working with her kitties (sic) back at the turn of the century when travelling shows of all kinds from the raunchy to the the evangelical gospel tents toured America year after year.

In the end notes the author explains where he has knowingly filled in the gaps which includes a period of incarceration in an asylum after Mabel fails to live up to the expectations of her first husband. Whilst this may seem an extreme leap to modern readers, such treatment was sadly all too common for women of Mabel's background at that time. And in the light of current events perhaps is something we need to be wary of in the future.

It seems churlish to say that the main criticism I have of the book is that I found it rather repetitive. It is after all a biography so it's not the author's fault. Perhaps some anecdotes were unecessary? Join circus, train cats, marry, divorce (or not as the case may be) leave circus with or without cats, join another circus, get mauled and so on.

Whilst there were several marriages there were really only two love stories and one was with a tiger. Both end tragically. The book did prompt me to do some research into Mabel Stark and the travelling shows of the time which I found fascinating and like joining the Foreign Legion, running away with the circus gave many women and other marginalised groups a freedom they would never have if they remained at home.

[Cheryl Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mabel Stark--a real-life tiger trainer in the circuses of the 1910s and '20s--had an amazing life by anyone's definition. But Hough does more than put it into narrative form. He uses all the tools of fiction to create a truly singular voice: His Mabel is a fighter in both the literal and figurative senses, jaw-droppingly adventurous yet somehow believable, and neurotic without ever being fussy or self-pitying. If sweet, bland Marlena in Water for Elephants drove you a little crazy, Mabel is the perfect antidote. The novel captures the circus' mystique as a home for outsiders (my favorite of which is Mabel's fifth husband, the cross-dressing animal whisperer), so the tone is enjoyably weird, yet also weirdly upbeat despite Mabel's many hardships.

[Kat Davidson · Rating 1 out of 5]

0 stars, this is the worst book I’ve ever read

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fictionalized first person account of the life of Mabel Stark, a Kentucky orphan born Mary Haynie who went from nurse to hootchie-kootchie dancer to top billed tiger tamer with the Barnum & Bailey circus in the 1920s. I found it fascinating, especially the descriptions of the circus and her relationships with the tigers. I wanted to find out more about circus life in general and Mabel Stark in particular.

What did I learn? Tigers are very, very dangerous (no surprise, right?) and Mabel has the scars to prove it. The Bengal tiger she raised from a cub nearly killed her in the ring.

[Sallee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once in a while a book comes along that captures your attention unlike many other books. This is one of those. This book is the fictionalized account of Mabel Stark, one of the world's greatest big cat trainers with her specialty being tigers. She really did exist and the author has taken her life history, her many husbands and her love of tigers and turned this into a hard and bittersweet story. Mabel was a very strong person and this comes through well as the author chronicles her life. It is a life full of living, giving and much danger about a woman way ahead of her time. Fascinating.

[Rosa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful, heartbreaking, and so very human. Mabel (or Mary) is only ever able to taste happiness for brief moments. It's so sad.
There were some parts, though, that wouldn't be out of place in a really sleazy '70s paperback with a crude line drawing of a woman and a tiger on the cover, that would be sold under a counter, or in one of those "adult bookstores" in the seedy part of the city. Context is everything. The line between art and pornography was blurred.
Having seen Tiger King and the Honest Trailer for same, it struck me how Mabel Stark's life fit the same pattern:
"Want to get into the exotic animal game? There's a few rules you gotta follow. One: you gotta be a polygamist."
Check.
"The thin line between exotic animal lover…and exotic animal lover."
Check.
"Payback [being mauled by exploited animals]."
Check and double check.
A roadside zoo owned by trashy people? Check. Husband killed by a tiger (allegedly, in Carole Baskin's case)? Check.
Tiger King made a huge impression on me. I was heartbroken and sick after I watched it. The tragedy of these magnificent creatures in Joe Exotic's hellish roadside zoo, being picked up and passed around by tourists all the time with no space or respect, living behind chain-link fences in overcrowded pens, eating expired meat in the hot Oklahoma sun, being MURDERED…it was all tragic and enraging, but what haunts me the most is the eyes of the snow leopard in the first episode. You never find out what happened to him.
Tiger King made me realize how horrible it is to take animals out of their natural habitat (and destroy that habitat) to exploit them. So that was on my mind as I read this book. But even so, I wish I could see what Mabel Stark's act was like. It would have really been something to see a tiger pyramid.
In the Honest Trailer tradition, I will retitle this book based on the above evidence. The new title is, of course, Tiger Queen.

[Rachel Insley · Rating 3 out of 5]

the concept of this book is soooo awesome but OMG did it take me a loooooong time to get through it. i’m obssessed with the story, its based of a real lady named Mabel Stark who was the most famous tiger trainer in american circus history, and this novel is like a fictional biography that follows her through 5 marriages and how she found herself in the circus and became soooo famous and talented and all these crazy things that happen to her. it was such a good story it was just a shame that it was so long, but i was honestly gripped from the first two chapters where she starts as a nurse and then gets shipped off to a mental hospital… until she runs away with the circus :P

[Angelinamehta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic story based on a real hero. I could not put this down. Totally unexpectedly excellent.

[Jasmine's · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting biography of life in the circus. In some places quite graphic in description Mabel Stark lived life to the full. The world's most famous tiger trainer in action.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some lives are so excessive that they begin to resemble myth long before the last breath escapes them. The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, Robert Hough’s incandescent novel about America’s first female tiger trainer, does not merely narrate one such life—it performs it, tames it, and finally sets it free again inside the reader’s mind.

The book masquerades as a historical reconstruction of a forgotten vaudevillian heroine; yet beneath that carnival façade beats the heart of a postmodern elegy on gender, power, and the lethal seduction of spectacle. It is a novel that prowls like the beasts it celebrates—beautiful, unpredictable, perpetually on the verge of violence—and its music lingers long after the tent collapses.

From the first page, Hough writes with a ventriloquist’s nerve. Mabel Stark speaks to us in a voice at once cracked and defiant, the grain of an old gramophone spinning confessions to an invisible listener. She is near the end of her life—an aged performer living in a Californian bungalow filled with tiger posters and ghosts—and she tells her story as if trying to make peace with the fangs that have both blessed and ruined her.

Yet what emerges is not repentance but something closer to performance: her “confession” is another act, another entrance through the velvet curtains of memory. The tone oscillates between bravado and regret, humour and heartbreak. One moment she is boasting of her impossible stunts, the next she is muttering like a vaudeville Lear about love, loss, and the smell of tiger musk in her dreams.

The brilliance of Hough’s novel lies in this unstable voice. He crafts Mabel as an unreliable narrator whose exaggerations reveal rather than conceal truth. Every memory is slightly bent, refracted through ego and pain, until the reader realizes that this is not autobiography but alchemy. Mabel transforms trauma into spectacle; she rewrites her life the way she once choreographed her circus routines—balancing risk, seduction, and applause.

The novel thus becomes a meta-performance about storytelling itself: to confess is to tame chaos into pattern. When Mabel recalls being mauled by Rajah, her favourite tiger, she narrates the event not as victimhood but as erotic metamorphosis—“I felt his teeth sink into me and I thought: well, now at last I belong to something.” It is an image that encapsulates the entire book’s philosophy: devotion is indistinguishable from destruction.

Hough situates this feral intimacy within a meticulously recreated circus world. The early twentieth-century American circus is rendered as both paradise and purgatory, an ecosystem of freaks, hustlers, and dreamers orbiting the big top’s illusion of control. The prose smells of sawdust and kerosene, of cheap whiskey and tiger musk. Every paragraph feels dipped in the grime of the road, yet illuminated by a strange spiritual glow.

Beneath the realism of the tents lies a metaphysics of performance—the idea that human beings, like trained animals, live by repetition and obedience to invisible cues. When Mabel describes her tigers’ movements, she might as well be describing herself: “They circle, they obey, but deep down they are thinking of the jungle.” The novel’s tragedy is that civilization never fully tames the wild; it merely disguises it under sequins.

As in Pierre La Mure’s reimagined Mona Lisa, what fascinates is not the biography but the act of myth making. Hough constructs Mabel’s life as a palimpsest of competing fictions: the showgirl who became a tiger queen, the woman punished for mastering masculine power, the aging relic who both resents and romanticizes her fame.

The structure of the novel mimics memory’s own ring-within-ring pattern, looping between past and present until time feels like a circus act endlessly rehearsed. We watch her rise through the ranks of the Ringling Brothers, marry and outlive five husbands, survive countless maulings, and finally descend into obscurity.

However, the narrative never lapses into linear biography. Instead, it circles—always returning to that primal encounter between woman and beast, art and instinct, body and desire.

At its core, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark is a meditation on the erotic politics of danger. Mabel’s relationship with her tigers is not metaphorical; it is viscerally embodied. She loves them as one might love a god—without reason, with total surrender.

Hough’s prose captures that strange symbiosis between dominance and worship: “When I raised the whip, I felt more alive than in any man’s arms, but when they crouched before me, I knew who the true master was.” In that inversion lies the novel’s feminist ferocity.

Mabel conquers the masculine realm of the circus, yet she is never allowed to transcend its cruelty. Men admire her courage but recoil from her autonomy; the audience applauds her spectacle but denies her humanity. Each lash of the whip becomes both assertion and self-punishment, each scar a signature of defiance.

The book’s postmodern genius is in how it turns this melodrama into a philosophical inquiry. Hough uses the circus not merely as setting but as epistemology. In a world governed by illusion, truth is a trick performed for those willing to believe. The narrator herself acknowledges this: “You learn quick in the circus that what matters isn’t what happens, but what folks think they saw.”

That line could serve as the manifesto for the entire twentieth century—from propaganda to advertising, from Hollywood to social media.

Hough writes as if aware that Mabel’s era is the embryo of our own: a culture addicted to spectacle, terrified of silence. Her life becomes a prophecy of the performative self, centuries before Instagram or reality TV.

What makes Mabel such an unforgettable narrator is her self-awareness. She knows she’s both legend and casualty, the woman who “made friends with death for applause.” Her storytelling is saturated with gallows humour—sharp, foul-mouthed, yet aching with tenderness. When she describes her marriages, the tone slides between vaudeville joke and Greek tragedy. One husband dies in a fall; another drinks himself into ruin; a third cannot bear her fame. She mourns them all with a shrug and a cigarette. “Men,” she says, “were just another kind of animal you had to keep fed and amused.” The line stings because it is both comic and true.

In Mabel’s world, love is a negotiation of fear, and the only faithful partner is the tiger who might kill her at any moment.

Yet beneath the bravado lies a yearning for transcendence. Hough infuses the novel with a spiritual melancholy that elevates it beyond mere historical spectacle. The circus becomes an allegory for mortality itself—each act rehearsed under the shadow of the inevitable fall. The whip cracks, the spotlight burns, the crowd gasps, and then darkness. Mabel’s final confession is not simply to the priest of memory but to the indifferent cosmos that has watched her dance with death.

She asks not for forgiveness but for understanding: that her obsession with control was also a form of prayer, that every roar she silenced was an echo of her own heart.

In a sense, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark is a feminist retelling of the Faust myth. Like Faust, Mabel bargains with forces larger than herself—fame, fear, animal instinct—and gains knowledge at the price of peace.

However, Hough reverses the moral: Mabel’s sin is not hubris but hunger. She wanted too much life, too much sensation, too much love from creatures incapable of returning it. Her downfall, when it comes, is quiet: the circus moves on without her, audiences grow bored, and she is left with memories that bite harder than any tiger.

Yet even in defeat, she retains a kind of savage grace. “I’d do it all again,” she says near the end, “because the world’s full of cages, and at least I picked mine.” That line, half-ironic, half-sacred, distills the modern condition—the awareness that freedom is often another form of captivity chosen with style.

Hough’s language is astonishingly tactile. He writes not like a historian reconstructing the past but like a magician conjuring scent and sound. The prose snaps with the crack of a whip, glows with the sulphur of the spotlight. Every scene feels painted in chiaroscuro—the glare of spectacle against the shadows of loneliness. His sentences have the muscular rhythm of old circus music, equal parts grandeur and decay. Even violence becomes aesthetic: the blood on Mabel’s arm is described as “a small red smile.” In that image lies the novel’s entire aesthetic: beauty blooming from brutality.

As with La Mure’s Mona Lisa, what fascinates is the act of preservation—how fiction resurrects a forgotten figure by mythologizing her anew. Hough turns archival obscurity into existential theatre. The historical Mabel Stark indeed lived such a life: born Mary Haynie in Kentucky, reinvented as a tiger trainer, and finally dead by suicide after dismissal from the circus. But Hough doesn’t merely report; he reincarnates. His Mabel is both historical ghost and literary invention, her voice a collage of truth and fantasy. That doubleness places the novel in dialogue with the tradition of postmodern biofiction—from Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot to Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian—where the boundary between fact and imagination collapses into a new kind of authenticity: emotional truth.

Reading the book now, in the twenty-first century’s twilight of authenticity, feels prophetic. Mabel’s confessions anticipate our era’s obsession with self-branding and curated trauma. She performs vulnerability before it became digital currency. Yet unlike our filtered confessions, hers come with blood and consequence. When she bleeds, she truly bleeds.

The novel reminds us what risk once meant before narrative became algorithmic. In that sense, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark is not nostalgia but warning—a mirror held up to our safe, simulated spectacles.

There’s also a psychoanalytic undertow to Hough’s narrative. Mabel’s relationship with her tigers often reads as a displacement of desire and repression, a dance with her own sublimated instincts. The whip becomes both phallic and maternal, symbol of mastery and protection. Her scars are the script of her unconscious—each marks a line in the autobiography of the body.

Freud might have called it repetition compulsion; Bataille would have called it erotic sacrifice. Hough, mercifully, calls it love. His genius is to let the reader feel the tremor without over-theorizing it. The novel’s sensuality is primal, not polished; it bleeds from instinct, not intellect.

What gives the book its emotional bite is the gradual disintegration of performance. As age encroaches, Mabel’s memory falters; she begins to confuse rehearsed stories with reality. The narrative fractures into monologues, hallucinations, letters unsent. Hough lets syntax mirror decay—sentences grow shorter, rhythm more feverish, as if the mind were closing its own circus.

By the final chapters, we are unsure whether Mabel speaks to a biographer, a journalist, a ghost, or the tiger that waits for her beyond death. This ambiguity transforms the novel into metaphysical fable. The confession becomes the rehearsal for the final act—the leap through the flaming hoop of mortality.

In its closing pages, Mabel describes a dream: she walks into the ring one last time, barefoot, unarmed, and the tigers rise to greet her like disciples. “They didn’t attack,” she says, “they just watched, waiting for me to start the show.” The image is unbearably tender. It suggests reconciliation between human and beast, artist and art, self and myth. When she steps forward, the lights fade, the crowd disappears, and all that remains is the sound of breathing—hers and theirs—merged into one.

That is the book’s true finale, its silent aria: the moment when performance becomes prayer.

Like La Mure, Hough writes with a painter’s intuition for metaphor. The circus, in his hands, is not merely social microcosm but cosmic allegory. The ring is the world; the cage is consciousness; the roar of the crowd is the illusion of meaning. Every act repeats the human condition: to balance on wires of desire, to leap through hoops of judgment, to survive applause that fades too quickly.

Mabel’s story thus transcends its historical boundaries and becomes a myth of existence itself—our endless rehearsal for a show that never really begins.

Comparatively, if La Mure’s Mona Lisa was about the stillness of beauty, Hough’s Mabel Stark is about its motion—the kinetic ecstasy of risking everything for the transient. Lisa smiled to survive immortality; Mabel smiles to defy it. Both are women trapped in the gaze, one painted, the other performed. Both wrestle with the male desire to capture and define them, and both find liberation in ambiguity. The smile of the Mona Lisa becomes, in Mabel’s grin beneath the circus lights, its feral twin.

Art, whether on canvas or under the big top, is the same dangerous negotiation between control and chaos.

By the end, one realizes that Hough’s novel is not really about the circus or even about Mabel Stark. It is about the tragic dignity of those who give their lives to something that cannot love them back. Whether that “something” is art, fame, or a tiger, the logic is the same: devotion consumes. The modern world, built on performance, inherits Mabel’s dilemma—we too dance for an audience that vanishes into darkness. The book leaves us with the uneasy realization that every confession, however sincere, is a kind of act, and every act is a confession we never intended.

What remains after the final page is not resolution but resonance. We feel the dust of the arena on our skin, the low growl of memory in our ears. Hough’s Mabel joins that pantheon of mythic narrators—Molly Bloom, Blanche DuBois, Humbert Humbert—whose voices echo long after the story ends. She is vulgar, wounded, luminous, impossible to forget. And her final confession, far from closure, opens the oldest question in art: what price do we pay to be seen?

The last lines of the novel, as I remember them, blur dream and death so gently that one cannot tell whether Mabel dies or merely dissolves into her story. Perhaps that is the only immortality available to performers—the privilege of never truly leaving the ring. Hough lets her vanish with a wink, a joke about her own legend, and the faint sound of applause receding into silence. It’s the perfect curtain call for a life lived as spectacle and survived as myth.

In the end, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark is not a biography, not even a novel, but an act of resurrection through language. It revives the extinct art of living dangerously, of turning pain into pageantry.

Like the tigers she loved, the book prowls the border between beauty and brutality, daring the reader to step closer.

Moreover, when you do, it does not maul you—it simply looks back, eyes golden with recognition, as if to say: “You too are in the cage.”

[Gail Baugniet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story about the greatest American circus tiger trainer fascinated me because we often stopped at the Baraboo circus and Wisconsin Dells on the way to visit relatives each summer. What I never expected was some of the confessions of this amazing woman. She plowed through life, experiencing pain and pleasure with equal gusto. Just when I thought she could have no more of interest to tell about her circus adventures, that's when she picked up the pace.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mabel Stark a real circus performer known for her famous tiger taming acts from the 1920's is the main character of this fictional memior by Robert Hough. The story begins with the 80 year old Stark telling her life story or confession and it is a thrill for us to read. Mabel has had more action packed into her life than most.
She begins life as Mary Haynie a teenage nurse in a small Kentucky town who ends up in a disasterous marriage and as a result finds herself in a mental institution suffering from a supposed nervous breakdown. When a sympathetic psychiatrist helps her to escape, she finds a job the only place she can, a cheap carnival as a dancing girl. Following another disaster of a marriage she is forced to dance "cooch" and finally gets spotted by Al. G Barnes who runs a somewhat more respectable carnival. It is here that Mabel encounters her beloved tigers and marries for a third time to well know animal trainer Louis Roth. Although the marriage doesn't work out, her career taming tigers is a smash hit. Barnes buys her a tiger cub named Rajah and Mabels life changes. Hough does a fascinating job describing life in the carny and creating the fictional life for all these historically real people. Mabels accounts of raising Rajah and the act she develops and the maulings she survives are nothing short of astonishing. She has a very interesting relationship to the animals.
As Mabel moves through husband number four, she is sought after and hired by the Ringling Bros. circus and becomes a bonafide star. She discovers that fame is not all it's cracked up to be and it is at one of her lowest points that she meets her true love Art, husband number five. It is a very poignant love story that the reader is treated to and you can't help but root for Mabel to be happy after what she has endured. But this story is full of surprises and twists and I was hanging on every word wondering much as Mabel would muse, what life was going to bring her next. I thoroughly enjoyed this story, at 422 pages, it was slow in some parts but overall it was a pleasure to discover Mabel, her world and the unique,quirky characters in her life.

[Linda Lipko · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this book last week and because it haunted me I wanted to allow time to put thoughts and feelings into words.

The story of Mabel Stark is an incredible one. Losing her parents at an early age meant Mabel had to fend for herself. After a brief time of nursing, Mabel gravitated to the circus. And, it is there that she found her career and love of dangerous tigers. The early 1900's were the golden age of circus. Brazen, gutsy, suicidally courageous, Mabel hailed as the most dramatic performer and was given center stage/ring for the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Mauled several times and at death's doorstep, she recovered and continued to perform, at one time with 18 tigers in the rink.

Her life was checkered with husbands (five of them) and tigers, including a beloved Bengal tiger Rajah. Raising the tiger much like a baby, it was housed in her dressing room.

Weighing under 100 pounds, and thin of frame, Mabel thrilled and captivated audiences as she courageously added more tigers and greater death defying feats to her act.

Tragically, the tiger queen committed suicide when she was 79.

This book, is as the cover notes, "a brilliant and exhilarating look at America before television and movies when circus reigned and an unlikely woman captured the public imagination with her singular charm and audacity."

What the cover does not note is that the vivid, explicit details of her sexual history consume way too many pages of the book. It is a severe detraction from the story. I understood that the author wanted to make a point that she was adventurous in a time when women were perceived to be quiet and unassuming, still I was repulsed by the graphic descriptions.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED this book! A friend read it years ago, then I found it somewhere and have had it on a shelf for a couple of years, one of those reads you mean to get round to.

So finally I read it and I loved it! I loved Mabel, the book is written in the first person, and reads like speech, very convincingly. Mabel is a survivor, fiesty, no nonsense, flawed and vulnerable. She was a real person, and Hough has thoroughly researched her life and spoke to people who knew her, and has created a vivid strong character - whatever the real Mabel Stark was like, the woman in this book is an excellent tribute to her.

The other characters are strong too - even though the narrative is Mabels, she describes the people around her so well you can hear their voices and see their mannerisms.

Most of all I loved Rajah. Loving two glorious little cats myself I could completely understand (even if I don't think I would quite go as far as Mabel to indulge my kitties) her love for her tiger.

Plans to make this into a film are struggling for want of investment, all I can say is I hope they make it and I hope they're as faithful to the book as Hough has tried to be to Mabel Stark's life.

[Rose Reid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in a time before television became our primary source of entertainment, Final Confession is an engrossing look not just at the life of a remarkable woman but also at a life style long gone, the traveling circus. Mabel Stark was a woman who really existed and Robert Hough has written a compelling novel about her life. I always ask myself when reading a book based on a real person how well done the research was and there is no way really of knowing but the end result is a very good story.

Mabel was a fascinating person, women who step outside the "normal" roles expected of them always intrigue me and Mabel did it in a time when it was much more risky than it is today. Our book club read this book and were (for a change) undivided in enjoying it. The end is sad, but then ends often are and Mabels certainly was in real life.

If you love unconventional women, big cats, circus stories or books set in the early 1900's this is a good book for you.

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, this was a pretty good book! The subject, the life of tiger-trainer Mabel Stark, was absolutely fascinating. I must admit that there was a rather outrageous quality, but I suppose that no circus life would be complete if the story was wholesome or toned down... Despite some questionable actions, Mabel was very likable and really, my main complaint was that the titillating secret the author teased the reader with from the beginning was not nearly as shocking as it could have been, considering some of the other things that went on! For a fictional biography, this was really wonderfully done with a carefully crafted picture of Mabel's whole life. Though the pacing was a bit uneven, and it would have been interesting to see more at the very end, the unique premise and strong writing more than made this an absorbing read.

[Gretchen Bernet-Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing story and whether or not it's a fictionalised autobiography, Robert Hough has created an engrossing picture of another era, a tough way of life long gone. Seen through the eyes of eccentric tiger-tamer Mabel Stark, the reader is pulled into the good bad and ugly side of circus life in America and the treatment of women. She married five times and whether or not Mabel was a victim of her times, she certainly survived some horrendous events, moving moments and daredevil escapades to become an unconventional and inventive showstopper. Over a week, I listened to this Bolinda audio book and I congratulate the author for his research and narrator Betty Bobbitt for excellent voice characterisation. I was there in the audience the whole time!

[Karina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well... Six stars for the life story of this unique woman. But unfortunately I did not like the book. I felt like I picked it from the wrong shelf - where cheap paperbacks with unimaginative sex content should be. The book is written as Mabel would tell the story - and it is not believable a bit. At first I was fine, but then I could not help but hear a man`s voice pretending to be a woman... Sad and disappointing. I respect author for his research but I think he should not have tried to write a fictional novel. At least, some other style would suit him better. I would not recommend this book, but certainly would recommend to learn about Mabel Stark life somewhere else.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book on the clearance rack and thought that the story seemed like it would be interesting. I mistakenly thought it was narrative non-fiction, which I really enjoy, but alas, it is "narrative-driven nonfiction." Not quite the same thing! Still, I gave it a shot, but having read over 100 pages, I find that I just don't care what happens next. And the time I can devote to reading is too short to read something I'm just not that interested in. Plus, the writing style is a bit too colloquial for my taste. So, on to the next book!

[Sezin Koehler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed getting to know Mabel Stark, the first female tiger trainer in the world and all around interesting lady. That's the majority of the stars above. However, I think it could have been much more compassionately written and often I felt it wasn't really Mabel's voice telling the tale at all, it was a very apparent Mr. Hough. So few men really have the ability to write women, but anyway still worth a read.

[Ruth Collier · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that sounds like it's going to be fun and then his you hard. I'd never heard of Mabel Stark before spotting this book in a charity shop, and even then didn't realise she was a real person. Though i can't say how accurate this fictional account is, or how she would feel about certain personal details the author apparently invented/assumed, she is presented as an incredibly interesting character and i was really moved by the events in the later part of the book.

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an INCREDIBLE book. I actually listened to it on CD on a road trip and was completely enthralled almost from the start (hang in a dozen pages or so). After listening to it for some 12 hours or so it always stayed with me through the weeks. It kept calling to me so I bought it and read it.

It's full of beautiful, kooky, kinky, startling, and delicious tension filled moments.

[D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

An old favourite in need of reacquaintance. This is a mildly sensational, fictionalized first-person biography of a woman who didn't often take "No" for an answer.

[Pat Morris-jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book, interesting and well written. In the middle it seemed to lose its way a tad, just a bit of editing there and it would have been 5 stars. Long book hence editing became important!