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Girl Flees Circus
When nineteen-year-old aviatrix Katie Burke crash lands her biplane on the only street in No Name, New Mexico, her arrival changes her life and the lives of everyone around her. As Katie and her craft need repair, locals take her in and help her, including a schoolteacher who longs for Katie's friendship, an interracial couple who own the town's diner, a handsome young mechanic who lives in a teepee, and a shell-shocked veteran of World War I. As her story unfolds, Katie's mysteries deepen--revealing shocking secrets, a scandalous past, and a future in true peril. Girl Flees Circus takes flight the moment Katie crashes to earth, promising a journey into the lives of a glamorous, redheaded stranger and the people she will change forever.
Kindle Edition
Published August 2, 2022
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About the author
C.W. Smith
24 books11 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
August 24, 2022
C.W. Smith, Girl Flees Circus (Lynn and Lynda Miller Southwest Fiction Series)
by Lynn Hoggard
When nineteen-year-old aviatrix Katie Burke, like a goddess-ex-machina, drops from the sky onto a not-altogether-empty dirt road in No Name, New Mexico, she and the tiny town are changed forever. Part of the fun of this book is watching the six or eight main characters work out their individual destinies as a result of this biplane-cum-asteroid that crashes into their lives.
But what makes the novel lift off the page and soar is the author’s exceptional gift for detail in capturing the characters’ complex and distinctive personalities (e.g.: ”Wally bore a strong… maternal impulse, maybe because, thought Louise, she hadn’t had children or hadn’t had to endure living with one who hates your guts night and day”). That gift is put to masterful use in the development of each of the characters, including their struggles and yearnings, throughout the novel.
The plot holds surprising twists, one of which is watching the inhabitants of No Name come together to create a small, sustaining universe that aids the young, female pilot, from the handsome and brilliant but hapless Leonard, who lives in a teepee, to the rock-steady but internally unmoored black café owner Otis, who bears emotional scars from racist events in his life. The dialogue buoys the plot along like a tailwind, moving it seemingly effortlessly to its inevitable series of conclusions.
Building on such precision of detail in character and sense of place, Girl Flees Circus seems destined to become a regional classic.
by Lynn Hoggard
When nineteen-year-old aviatrix Katie Burke, like a goddess-ex-machina, drops from the sky onto a not-altogether-empty dirt road in No Name, New Mexico, she and the tiny town are changed forever. Part of the fun of this book is watching the six or eight main characters work out their individual destinies as a result of this biplane-cum-asteroid that crashes into their lives.
But what makes the novel lift off the page and soar is the author’s exceptional gift for detail in capturing the characters’ complex and distinctive personalities (e.g.: ”Wally bore a strong… maternal impulse, maybe because, thought Louise, she hadn’t had children or hadn’t had to endure living with one who hates your guts night and day”). That gift is put to masterful use in the development of each of the characters, including their struggles and yearnings, throughout the novel.
The plot holds surprising twists, one of which is watching the inhabitants of No Name come together to create a small, sustaining universe that aids the young, female pilot, from the handsome and brilliant but hapless Leonard, who lives in a teepee, to the rock-steady but internally unmoored black café owner Otis, who bears emotional scars from racist events in his life. The dialogue buoys the plot along like a tailwind, moving it seemingly effortlessly to its inevitable series of conclusions.
Building on such precision of detail in character and sense of place, Girl Flees Circus seems destined to become a regional classic.
January 3, 2025
About as fun a book as you can hope to read this winter. Delightful characters and believable situations from an author who grew up in a place a lot like Noname. Captures the feeling of the West right before the big oil strikes. Loved it.
March 4, 2023
Adventure and Passion
This was a wonderful book about one young girl's passion and unplanned adventure. She discovered the need for friends and how a community is built by each individual person adding to the health and caring to keep it whole. A coming of age, of gratitude, trust in working together to accomplish anything.
I love the voices that come to life with each character in the book. It was hard to put down!
This was a wonderful book about one young girl's passion and unplanned adventure. She discovered the need for friends and how a community is built by each individual person adding to the health and caring to keep it whole. A coming of age, of gratitude, trust in working together to accomplish anything.
I love the voices that come to life with each character in the book. It was hard to put down!
February 25, 2023
49 years ago, I was a "girl Pilot". I'm drawn to stories of other young female pilots, and this caught my eye in New Mexico Magazine.
The opening brought back memories of my own solo flights, but Katie's was much more dramatic.
I loved the story with so many varied characters whose back stories would make interesting reading. Each person in NoName was touched by the arrival of the aviatrix. Each grew from the boredom of a small, struggling town to seeing a world beyond the town's borders.
The ending was rather abrupt with Katie and her father delivering mail in Texas. A more detailed segue would have been wonderful, but all in all, it was a delightful story.
The opening brought back memories of my own solo flights, but Katie's was much more dramatic.
I loved the story with so many varied characters whose back stories would make interesting reading. Each person in NoName was touched by the arrival of the aviatrix. Each grew from the boredom of a small, struggling town to seeing a world beyond the town's borders.
The ending was rather abrupt with Katie and her father delivering mail in Texas. A more detailed segue would have been wonderful, but all in all, it was a delightful story.
January 5, 2024
Pretend you’re at the controls of a biplane in the late 1920s. One second you’re flying along over west Texas when you get caught in a thunderstorm, the next you’re crashlanding into the parched burg of No Name, New Mexico. The town residents gather round. What’s more shocking? That you’ve survived the unwieldy landing, or that your sudden presence is the most exciting thing to happen in a town with only one café which happens to have the only telephone?
Or pretend you’re one of the town residents. What’s more shocking, that an aeroplane has come swooping down onto Main Street after clipping a wing on a Model T, or that the pilot climbing out of the cockpit is a tiny young woman with unruly hair?
In his latest novel, Girl Flees Circus, noted author C. W. Smith shines the spotlight on the small dusty fictional town of No Name, New Mexico, located in the southeast corner of the state. It’s refreshing to read a novel set in this region of New Mexico, often the forgotten side of the state when it comes to art and literature. Smith, a longtime Dallas resident, grew up in Hobbs, NM and returns to his roots in this story where a stranger arrives and shakes things up.
It’s also refreshing to read about an unknown aviatrix who wasn’t trying to set a world record when she ended up in a small town that rolled out the “red carpet” and gave her the warmth of friendship and respect she’d hungered for. Kudos also to the author for gifting us with a historical novel that’s relevant with many of the same societal issues we deal with today.
Or pretend you’re one of the town residents. What’s more shocking, that an aeroplane has come swooping down onto Main Street after clipping a wing on a Model T, or that the pilot climbing out of the cockpit is a tiny young woman with unruly hair?
In his latest novel, Girl Flees Circus, noted author C. W. Smith shines the spotlight on the small dusty fictional town of No Name, New Mexico, located in the southeast corner of the state. It’s refreshing to read a novel set in this region of New Mexico, often the forgotten side of the state when it comes to art and literature. Smith, a longtime Dallas resident, grew up in Hobbs, NM and returns to his roots in this story where a stranger arrives and shakes things up.
It’s also refreshing to read about an unknown aviatrix who wasn’t trying to set a world record when she ended up in a small town that rolled out the “red carpet” and gave her the warmth of friendship and respect she’d hungered for. Kudos also to the author for gifting us with a historical novel that’s relevant with many of the same societal issues we deal with today.
October 10, 2022
Held my attention throughout
August 20, 2023
After I finished C.W. Smith’s GIRL FLEES CIRCUS, I was ready to sign up for flying lessons! I was drawn into the world of Katie Burke, a teenage aviatrix who crash lands in Noname, New Mexico in 1928 as she is trying to make her way across the country in an open cockpit biplane. As the story unfolds, we gradually learn about Katie’s world and about what she’s running from. She is befriended by the residents of this barren spot on the wide western plains. She shakes up the residents’ world and the ambitions of many of the characters. Though inspired by early aviatrixes and in particular Amelia Earhart’s brief stop in Smith’s own hometown of Hobbs, New Mexico in 1928, the novel and characters are all Charlie Smith’s creation and what a compelling creation and cast of characters they are. GIRL FLEES CIRCUS does what good literature does; it draws the reader into a world not his own and lets the reader see from different vantage points in time and place and history all the while showing the humanity that binds us all together. I highly recommend GIRL FLEES CIRCUS. See you in the skies, though I won’t be flying the plane.
September 10, 2022
Great characters, great story, great feel for place
audio-tbr
February 8, 2023New Mexico
April 21, 2023
I liked the zany writing style.
June 13, 2024
Aviatrix makes emergency landing in small town in New Mexico. Fun introduction to early days of flight and women in the fields.
April 27, 2025
Slow in a beautiful way, but still slow. It wasn’t a page turner for me, but still showed me a life in 1920s New Mexico I wouldn’t have thought about otherwise.
May 26, 2025
What a fabulous little book.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews