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Robert Hough's The Final Confession Of Mabel Stark

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Robert Hough’s, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, is a fictional autobiography based on the professional career of Mabel Stark. As a preeminent tiger trainer, Mabel Stark performed with various circuses for fifty years before working for JungleLand, which is a zoo and animal training facility in California. Mabel Stark killed herself four months after retiring from JungleLand around the suspected, yet, unconfirmed age of eighty. After the disappointing ending (I’ll explain later), the book has a section titled “Research Notes” where Robert Hough states the facts he knew about Mabel Stark before starting his fictional project. Here we discover how Mabel Stark’s personal life before entering the circus was unknown to both historians and to her friends, and from what they did know—which was that Mabel may have had a nervous breakdown prior to joining the circus—was based on rumors. Robert Hough filled in the mysterious blanks of her life through his own imaginings.
The majority of The Final Confession of Mabel Stark takes place in the 1910s and 1920s, which is when Mabel began her life-long career training tigers. The 1920s’ traveling circus is also the time …show more content…

whether or not the fairgrounds were muddy or dry), and the energy. Overall, I learned a lot about how to incorporate minor and important details without overwhelming the reader. Moreover, I learned how to establish the setting as its own character and to reveal this character throughout the entire length of the book. (There wasn’t one chapter where Robert Hough didn’t explain a behind-the-scenes look into circus life.) His descriptions were vivid and his details enhanced his story, which as a writer is something that I am striving to

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