Home of the American Circus

Home of the American Circus (2025) is a novel by Alison Larkin. The action is mostly set in 2007 in the town of Somers, New York, when Freya returns to sell the house her parents owned and finds her 15-year-old niece, Aubrey, living there. As Freya reconnects with Aubrey and tries to win back her trust, she finds herself confronting painful memories of her hapless father, frustrated and abusive mother, and cruel half-sister, Steena, who is Aubrey’s mother. While repairing the house and reconnecting with old friends, Freya comes to terms with her childhood wounds, but she is determined to free Aubrey from the same abusive dynamics she once faced. The novel explores The Human Need for Nurturance, The Importance of Interrupting Cycles of Abuse, and Forging Community and Family Ties.

This guide uses the 2025 hardcover edition by Gallery Books.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide feature depictions of emotional abuse, sexual assault, bullying, suicidal ideation, death, sexual content, and substance use and dependency. There are also references to termination of a pregnancy and death by suicide.

Plot Summary

The Prologue introduces a scene of Freya driving in a car with her five-year-old niece, Aubrey, who is eating ice cream. The following chapter is set in Maine in February 2007, 10 years later. After an emergency appendectomy, Freya, who is 29 and single, can no longer afford to stay in her apartment. After her parents died in a car accident some years prior, Freya inherited their house in Somers, New York, the town she left 10 years ago when she broke off contact with her family. Freya drives back to find the house falling into disrepair and sees signs that someone has been there recently.

Freya visits her friend Jam, a musician who still lives with his father and now works at a local grocery. Jam forgives Freya for leaving and understands that she had a difficult childhood. Her mother already had Freya’s older half-sister, Steena, when she married Step, Freya’s father, a man her mother bullied and looked down on. Freya longed for her mother and Steena’s approval and felt keenly their disapproval of and cruelty to her, and she always wished Step would stand up for her. Freya doesn’t want Steena or Steena’s husband, Charlie, to know she’s in town, so she dyes her hair to be less recognizable.

Freya returns to her house to find Aubrey, now 15, staying there. Though Freya loves and missed Aubrey, she is cautious about trying to reconnect, as she understands that Aubrey is wary of trusting her now. A run-in with Steena at the grocery store confirms that Steena still holds animosity toward Freya. Freya meets with her lawyer, Hans, to discuss the bills she has to pay on the house, including taxes and insurance. She gets a job at the bar of a restaurant where she used to work, The Aster, and finds herself welcomed back by old friends. She also meets Eddie, a childhood friend who is now an EMT.

Concerned that Steena will be angry, Freya questions why Aubrey is spending so much time at the house, and Aubrey, hurt, leaves. One night at the bar, Freya runs into another childhood friend, Bee. Bee is a guidance counselor at the school and reveals that Aubrey is being bullied by classmates accusing her of getting an abortion after she was sexually assaulted by a classmate’s brother. In anger, Steena kicked Aubrey out of the house. Freya rushes home to find Aubrey in the basement and promises that Aubrey can stay with her.

Freya begins to repair the house and rebuild her relationship with Aubrey, who works at the grocery store with Jam. After an ice storm in April reveals a leak in the roof, Freya clears her parents’ belongings out of their room and begins to make peace with the ways her parents failed her. Freya worries about Jam’s substance use and tries to help him by moving his piano into her house. She joins Aubrey and Aubrey’s best friend, Shray, in making art, including woodworking with the tools that belonged to Freya’s great-grandfather.

Each part of the book concludes with a separate narrative segment on the topic of Old Bet, a circus elephant who was owned and exhibited by Somers resident Hachaliah Bailey. There is a statue to Old Bet in the town square, and Freya always blows a kiss and says “Sorry, Bet,” when she passes. Freya dropped out of college when a history professor objected to a paper she had written on Old Bet questioning why the town valorized Bailey for keeping Old Bet captive and exploiting her.

Occasional chapters contain flashbacks of Freya’s interactions with Charlie, who started making sexual advances when Freya was 15. The night her college boyfriend dumped her, Freya got drunk at a bar, and Charlie had sex with her. Later, Charlie tried kissing Freya again, and when she fought him, Steena found them together. The family believed Freya was “throwing herself” at Charlie, and that was the reason she left Somers.

Freya talks to a realtor about the improvements she would have to make if she wanted to sell the house, and Aubrey, who believes Freya intends to leave Somers again, goes back to her parents’ house.

Freya struggles to earn enough money to pay the taxes and insurance bills. She is forming deeper relationships with people in Somers and begins a sexual relationship with Eddie as well as with Jam. The night of Aubrey’s 16th birthday party, Freya goes to Steena and Charlie’s house to confront them. Finding that Aubrey is miserable there, Freya brings Aubrey to live with her. They decide they will take the equipment Step collected and hike the Appalachian Trail. With the help of Bee and Hans, Freya gains legal guardianship of Aubrey and lets her take the GED so she can leave her school and the classmates who continue to bully her. Their friends in Somers help her and Aubrey prepare for the expedition. Though Freya invites Jam to come with them, he declines.

The Epilogue shows Aubrey and Freya nearly at the end of the trail and receiving news that Freya’s house burned down. She feels free of her childhood and able to go anywhere.