Review: Gypsy

Gypsy by Dan Foley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Review: GYPSY by Dan Foley

Gosh I love this book. It's compactly taut, requiring only a minimal suspension of disbelief. Starting with a carnival in Vermont in 1956 (a decent carnival, where the carnies demonstrate family feeling, not the horror show type often found in fiction), we the reader quickly discover that the carnie crew, and most of the townspeople are good guys. Unfortunately, the town does contain some bad apples--or rather, one monstrous (in both character and size, most unfortunately) and his personal cache of five acolytes, for whom he constantly plays his own version of Simon Says (or else). He is seemingly unstoppable; and not too stable. When he and his followers (not equal enough to be buddies) commit a horrid crime in July 1956, his own personal enabler, his brother the Sheriff, blows it away.

Fifty years later, a seventy-two-old man, a Vietnam vet, originally from New Jersey, happens into the carnival, mostly for distraction. With brain cancer, he only has three to four months to live--until he meets his destiny and finds his purpose, discovering himself returned to 1956. His hero's quest: to right a terrible wrong, to overturn a gross miscarriage of justice, and to wreak someone else's revenge. What a page-turner!

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