Truevine is a moving attempt to reconstruct this David and Goliath story, a chronicle of the Muses’ unlikely victory in a game that was doubly rigged against them … Warm, personable, and empathetically speculative, it centers on experiences that shed delicate on the brothers’ inner lives … You can’t fault a writer for not discovering what isn’t there to be known. But it’s strenuous to escape the sense that some of the time Macy spends developing the Muse brothers’ scant personal history might have been better spent on a subject she assiduously avoids: the attraction of their stage personae as sideshow freaks … The book’s most glaring flaw is its unwillingness to make a study of the sideshow’s spectators.
