Rating: 
Summary: The golden age of the circus and its lion tamer
Review: Possibly the greatest tiger trainer of all time, certainly the greatest female trainer, Mabel Stark rose to the top of her profession during the heyday of the circus, the 1910's and `20s. Tiny but fearless, she drew huge crowds, particularly for the wrestling act with her 500 pound Bengal, Rajah, conducted in a leather jumpsuit which became her signature costume.
Canadian author Hough's well-researched debut novel (which won Ontario's Trillium Award) is full of the rough and tumble of circus life. As involving as it is informative, as moving as it is riveting, the book takes the form of a memoir, or confession. It's the end of a career that spanned five husbands and rose from carny girlie shows to top billing at Ringling, followed by a long denouement as a trainer at JungleLand animal park. It's 1968 and Mabel is facing her 80th birthday.
"Still, I'm not a complainer, never have been never will be, so I'll skip the drawbacks and jump to the thing I do like about aging. The mind gets supple. Believe it or not, it does. You start seeing around corners. You start picturing what's behind you without having to crane your neck (which you can't do anyway, seeing as it's getting stiffer by the day). It's the one recompense of being aged and wrinkly and sore: you learn the trick of being in two places at once."
Time, she says, changes with age. From a forward march it becomes an accumulation, then something different again: "like gumballs in a penny machine, all mixed together, jumbled up, rubbing the colour off one another." Age has affected how she sees her "greatest sin," the event that divided her life into "before" and "after." "Then one day I woke up and my worst sin had come unhobbled in time. Started wandering, it had. Suddenly it was something I'd always done, something I'd always been capable of doing. Suddenly it was a part of me."
Mabel anchors the narrative in 1968, moving between past and present. But mostly she keeps the flow chronological. An author's note at the end describes Hough's major sources of research and his considered departures from known fact. It's known that Mabel was a nurse before she became a carnival dancer, but how she got there is vague, though at least one source says she had a nervous breakdown. Hough provides her with a boorish husband and has him commit her, mostly because she found sex with him abhorrent. The horror of marriage is only exceeded by the sadistic therapy, and Mabel uses her God-given wits to get as far from both as possible. Sensing what the one kindly doctor wants to hear from her, she eventually convinces him to help her escape and thanks to another man, finds herself a carny show job.
Men are the pattern in Mabel's life. An orphan, she's spent her life looking for love. Though she never develops much interest in sex, men mark the high and low points in her life. Cats are the constant. When lion trainer Louis Roth falls for her, he gives her her heart's desire - a chance to work with the big cats. From there it's onwards and upwards, except when some man shoots her down. And all the while, she's building toward that day in 1927 when her life changed forever, when she did something so awful, it takes most of the book to get there.
"The thing that scares me the most? The thing that makes me jittery, that makes me dart for one of Dr. Brisbane's pills, that makes me contemplate rash actions: What if neither God nor luck has anything to do with it? What if we make our own luck? What if everything that happens to us happens because we wanted it that way?"
An awful thought for a woman who's had a lot of luck, good and bad, and it's a fear she develops throughout the narrative as impulse and timing combine to send her soaring and tumbling. Mabel's personality drives this unsparing, tumultuos story, full of love and loss, but weighted with her inability to sustain happiness.
Hough steeps the story in circus atmosphere - the ego and competitiveness of the performers, the strict pecking order, the downtrodden workingmen, the animals, the day-to-day tribulations of life on the road in all weather. The tedious hard work of training and the sudden heart-stopping tiger maulings. It's an exotic and exciting picture of the circus' golden age and one talented and tormented (and well scarred) star. A wonderful novel, which marks the debut of a writer to watch.
Rating: 
Summary: A Romp, A Lark, A Hoot
Review: Robert Hough may be a new voice in fiction, but his storytelling talents are like those of a veteran.
"The Final Confession Of Mabel Stark" tells the tale of a rebel, who finds both her calling, and her salvation in the unorthodoz world of tiger training. Stark was a real-life entertainer, who was a noted act in the Ringing Bros. circus, reaching her peak of popularity in the 20's and early 30's - but the book is an imagined biography, giving the author license to fashion a life as large and colorful as Mabel apparently was.
Told in a breezy style, with great humor and very talented wordplay, the author takes us from Mabel's "traditional" life (nurse, housewife) through mental problems, abusive marriages and dance girl days, until she finds both her calling (as a cat trainer) and the love of her life (a lipstick wearing man named Art Rooney, who is a wonderful character, deserving of his own book). Hough gives Mabel a literary voice that begins as sad, shifting to (extremely) wise-cracking, and finally all-knowing. Her adventures with the circus and her many cats (the best parts of the book involve Mabel's interactions with her many felines over the years, and this interaction propels the story and brings about the shifts in Mabel that prove to be her ultimate triumph), are both hysterical and thought-provoking - much like something Tom Robbins would write.
This book is an unexpected pleasure - I picked it up because of the classic circus design on the cover, because I had never heard of the wirter, or book before (it is a first novel by Hough). I'm glad to welcome him as a new talent, and hope that he has more of this wonderful type of storytwlling within himself.
Rating: 
Summary: Fizzles out
Review: The book started exceedingly well but halfway through meandered and got lost. Rather poor especially considering the great promise it held at it's commence.
Rating:
Summary: Mabel Stark, tiger lady
Review: This was a fascinating book about an intriguing real-life woman who worked the circus in it's heyday as one of a rare few female big cat trainers. It goes into wonderful details about circus life at that time, what it was like for the working men and women and not just the star acts. Mabel is a marvel and I hope they do a good job with the movie.
Rating:
Summary: Let's all join the circus!
Review: Until the end of this wonderful story, I didn't realize that it was a fiction about a "real character"...and what a wonderful "character" Mabel Stark is!The life of Mabel Stark, and all of her alias' was so much fun, and pain. The history of the carnivals and circus with all of it's eccentricities was so interesting. The character's were wonderful, and seeing everything through the eyes of this wonderful woman was...enlightening. She had such a great take on her life, and the way lifes ups and downs influence the journey. Her journey was heartbreaking at times, joyful at other times, but always interesting and exciting. I just loved her! Read and enjoy!
Debbi :)
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: When I read the enthusiastic review in the San Francisco Chronicle, I rushed to buy this book. I was disappointed on two fronts. First, the story seems like an odd choice for a "truth-based novel." On one hand, this truth was apparently stranger than fiction, so why did he fictionalize it? At times, I desperately wanted access to "the truth." For instance, I wanted to read Mabel Stark's own account of her quasi-sexual relationship with the tiger -- an account that actually exists -- not the author's speculation about her state of mind. On the other hand, the very idea of Mabel Stark evidently triggered the darker corners of the author's imagination, so why did he limit himself to the plot laid out by the biographical details of her life? At times, it felt like he was hiding some emotional truth that an invented story might have revealed. Throughout my reading, I often felt frustrated. My second area of complaint is somewhat superficial, but I think this contributed to my sense that the author's own emotional and psychological perspective intruded upon the writing. Stark was evidently a woman who had (at best!) ambivalent relationships with men, and one who earned her fame in feats of athleticism and bravery that were amazing in a person of any gender. I was a little disturbed that Hough's fictional Mabel would choose to frame the narrative of her life as a journey that starts with...er...manually servicing a bedridden man, and ends with...er...orally servicing another bedridden man!
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: When I read the enthusiastic review in the San Francisco Chronicle, I rushed to buy this book. I was disappointed on two fronts. First, the story seems like an odd choice for a "truth-based novel." On one hand, this truth was apparently stranger than fiction, so why did he fictionalize it? At times, I desperately wanted access to "the truth." For instance, I wanted to read Mabel Stark's own account of her quasi-sexual relationship with the tiger -- an account that actually exists -- not the author's speculation about her state of mind. On the other hand, the very idea of Mabel Stark evidently triggered the darker corners of the author's imagination, so why did he limit himself to the plot laid out by the biographical details of her life? At times, it felt like he was hiding some emotional truth that an invented story might have revealed. Throughout my reading, I often felt frustrated. My second area of complaint is somewhat superficial, but I think this contributed to my sense that the author's own emotional and psychological perspective intruded upon the writing. Stark was evidently a woman who had (at best!) ambivalent relationships with men, and one who earned her fame in feats of athleticism and bravery that were amazing in a person of any gender. I was a little disturbed that Hough's fictional Mabel would choose to frame the narrative of her life as a journey that starts with...er...manually servicing a bedridden man, and ends with...er...orally servicing another bedridden man!
Rating:
Summary: Admitting to "the worst thing one person can do to another"
Review: Written by a finalist for the 2002 Commonwealth Writer Prize and the 2002 Trillium Award, The Final Confession Of Mabel Stark is the fictional autobiography of Mabel Stark, a female tiger trainer known as the "Mae West of tiger taming". A star attraction for the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus, married five times, and living a live filled with courage, tragedy, adventure, and daring, The Final Confession Of Mabel Stark opens with its hero at the age of 80, about to lose her job and longing to confess, including admitting to "the worst thing one person can do to another."
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