From School Library Journal
Grade 8 Up–The only world that 13-year-old Eva Wilkins has ever known is her quiet life on the Colorado prairie with Daddy Walter and Mama Kate. But now that they have both died, her only option is to go live with the mother who gave her up at birth. She makes her first trip to Denver all alone and is wide-eyed with astonishment at all the people and buildings. But she is more shocked when she learns that her mother is a prostitute in a well-to-do brothel on notorious Holladay Street, and, even more, that her mother's skin is white, while Eva's is coffee-colored. After she is put to work dancing with the customers for a quarter each, she knows that she has to escape Holladay Street before she is forced to "work upstairs." Carbone's novel portrays the harsh realities of the options for single women in the late-Victorian era in the United States without graphic sexual references. The desperation and anguish these women feel are well wrought and palpable as they are largely portrayed as victims of circumstance. The only element that seems to be missing is the establishment of the racial climate for a young girl who is half black and half white. And yet this book works well on two levels: it is a good historical picture of life in the city and the country of the late 1800s, and it is also a triumph of the female spirit over the oppressive choices women sometimes face.
–Anna M. Nelson, Collier County Public Library, Naples, FL Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Library Binding
edition.
Gr. 8-11. After the death of her loving, black foster parents in 1878, Eva, 13, makes her way to Denver, Colorado, in search of her birth mother, who turns out to be a white prostitute working in a brothel. For a time Eva shares a room with her half-sister in the whorehouse, where they earn their keep by dancing with the town's miners, carpenters, and cowhands. After Eva is told to work "upstairs," she runs away. On her journey, she encounters extraordinary kindness and danger (she even fights off a mountain lion by sticking her fingers in its eyes), but more than the perilous adventure, what drives the story is the authentic view of women in the old west. There's no detail about the sex in the brothel, just a strong sense of community among the desperate workers, and the triumph of a brave young woman who escapes to find real work and a home.
Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
