Mademoiselle Blanche: A Novel

Jules Le Baron is a respectable Parisian businessman with a comfortable life and no business being at the circus. Then Mademoiselle Blanche takes the ring at Cirque Parisien, and suddenly he understands what he's been missing. She's an acrobat, a woman who flies through the air with her body while Jules has spent his whole life keeping his feet planted firmly in bourgeois soil. He wants her with an intensity that frightens him. This is a novel about the dangerous mathematics of desire. Jules calculates what he might lose: his reputation, his position, his careful sense of himself. He calculates what he might gain: something real, something alive, something that doesn't fit inside the life he's built. The circus is a world of dangerous spectacle, where women are celebrated for their bodies and their daring while remaining outsiders to the society that watches them. Barry is interested in that tension between who performs the culture and who gets to enjoy it. For readers who crave their romance with a historical backdrop and a hint of the forbidden. It's a period piece that still has something to say about the weight of what we're told we can't have.