Genre: Fantasy, Paranormal, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
As a member of the Flying Galliers in the Carnival of Mysteries, Mario Gallier has remained an eternally young and carefree teenager for over a hundred years. When the Carnival stops for a time on a magic-sparse world, Mario finally meets a man for whom he wants to grow up. Unfortunately aging takes time, and the Carnival doesn’t linger anywhere for long.
Ilya Mirov was part of the greatest aerial straps duo in the world, but after losing his husband and partner Derek to cancer, he retired from performing to take a role as coach for the next great Circo Del Artes show, Capriccio. Yet men who are strong enough for the demands of the aerial straps are few and far between, and Ilya despairs of finding anyone who can handle his choreography.
Fate — and the Carnival — bring Mario back to Ilya’s world and to Circo Del Artes. Ilya is blown away by Mario’s talent and offers him a job. Elated, Mario believes he’ll have the chance to make Ilya see him as a man, not a child, and win Ilya’s heart at last.
Yet overcoming Ilya’s grief is only one hurdle in Mario’s way. Someone is preying on Circo’s paranormals, and Mario’s own hidden nature begins to surface. Ilya doesn’t believe in magic, and he doesn’t understand why Mario is driven to protect those who came from the Carnival. Dark forces press in from all sides, putting both Mario’s and Ilya’s lives at risk. Yet Mario knows that he alone can stop whoever is taking his friends, as well as find the killer who will stop at nothing to destroy both Mario and the man he loves.
The Review
Clearly, this new season is letting readers learn a great deal more about the Carnival of Mysteries than ever before. Rachel Langella’s “Airs Above the Ground” does this by focusing on a name that has been ever-present in the Carnival books, but almost always in the background. This book looks for the first time at the Gallier family—the aerialists who have been one of the Carnival’s main attractions ever since the series began. This time, however, we learn about Mario Gallier, one of the younger family members, and through his story we learn everything we didn’t know about the Galliers, their origins, and their relationship with Errante Ame and his magical carnival.
Mario is a teenager, and his older brother takes him to see a Las Vegas aerialist act during one of the Carnival’s stops in the Nevada desert. There, the adolescent Mario develops a crush on one of the pair of star strap aerialists (I looked that up), Ilya Mirov. The brothers return to the Carnival with a new act for the Galliers’ show—the straps—and Mario realizes that, after over a hundred years, he finally wants to grow up.
Six years later, the Carnival returns to Las Vegas, and Mario, a big, muscular 22-year-old now, gets a job offer from Ilya Mirov himself. Mario decides to leave the only place he’s ever called home and try his talents in the Circo del Arte. He is sent on his way with the Carnival’s blessing. As we know by now, the Carnival helps folks—magical or not—find their Path.
Langella has taken on the challenge of the Carnival of Mysteries and given her readers something fascinating and profound to think about. In some ways it’s a straightforward romance/adventure narrative; but it’s all a little unsettling, crossing boundaries of reality in ways that mingle paranormal with fantasy.
Five stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
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