Title:
Bowery Girl
Author: Kim
Taylor Blakemore
Genre: Women’s
Historical Fiction
From WILLA Award winning author
Kim Taylor Blakemore...
"...inspiring and poignant historical fiction novel that will engage readers that are looking for an insightful, yet entertaining read. " 5/5 stars, Luxury Reader
“lends credence to the millions of historical and contemporary girls who dare to dream in the face of extraordinary challenges.” - Starred Review, Kirkus
“Gang violence, raucous carousing, sex, accidental pregnancy, and crime–not what most will expect from Victorian-era historical fiction. But that’s exactly what they’ll find in this tightly plotted novel…” – Booklist
NEW YORK, 1883: Gamblers and thieves, immigrants and street urchins, Do-Gooders and charity houses, impossible goals and impossible odds. The Bowery is a place where you own nothing but your dreams. And dreams are the only things that come cheap for pickpocket Mollie Flynn and prostitute Annabelle Lee.
Pleasure is fleeting - and often stolen. Nights at Lefty Malone's saloon, sneaking into the Thalia Theatre. Then it's back to their airless, windowless tenement room and the ongoing struggle to keep a roof over their heads and bread in their stomachs.
The Brooklyn Bridge is nearing completion, and things are changing in New York City. The two women fantasize of starting a new life across the East River. Nothing but a flight of fancy, perhaps, until wealthy Do-Gooder Emmeline DuPre, who has opened the Cherry Street Settlement House, steps into their lives with her books, typewriters, and promises of a way to earn a respectable living. Despite Mollie and Annabelle's fascination with the woman and what she offers, is Emmeline helping or meddling?
Is it really possible to be anything other than a Bowery Girl? Mollie and Annabelle will have to decide exactly who they are, and what sort of women they want to be.
"...inspiring and poignant historical fiction novel that will engage readers that are looking for an insightful, yet entertaining read. " 5/5 stars, Luxury Reader
“lends credence to the millions of historical and contemporary girls who dare to dream in the face of extraordinary challenges.” - Starred Review, Kirkus
“Gang violence, raucous carousing, sex, accidental pregnancy, and crime–not what most will expect from Victorian-era historical fiction. But that’s exactly what they’ll find in this tightly plotted novel…” – Booklist
NEW YORK, 1883: Gamblers and thieves, immigrants and street urchins, Do-Gooders and charity houses, impossible goals and impossible odds. The Bowery is a place where you own nothing but your dreams. And dreams are the only things that come cheap for pickpocket Mollie Flynn and prostitute Annabelle Lee.
Pleasure is fleeting - and often stolen. Nights at Lefty Malone's saloon, sneaking into the Thalia Theatre. Then it's back to their airless, windowless tenement room and the ongoing struggle to keep a roof over their heads and bread in their stomachs.
The Brooklyn Bridge is nearing completion, and things are changing in New York City. The two women fantasize of starting a new life across the East River. Nothing but a flight of fancy, perhaps, until wealthy Do-Gooder Emmeline DuPre, who has opened the Cherry Street Settlement House, steps into their lives with her books, typewriters, and promises of a way to earn a respectable living. Despite Mollie and Annabelle's fascination with the woman and what she offers, is Emmeline helping or meddling?
Is it really possible to be anything other than a Bowery Girl? Mollie and Annabelle will have to decide exactly who they are, and what sort of women they want to be.
Author Bio
Kim
Taylor Blakemore writes women’s historical fiction and romance that
explore women’s lives and brings their struggles and triumphs out of the
shadows of history and onto the canvas of our American past.
She is the author of the novels Bowery Girl,
and Cissy Funk, winner
of the WILLA Literary Award for Best Young Adult Fiction. Her interactive
historical romances The Very Thought of You and It
Don’t Mean a Thing, are out now on Kindle and SilkWords.com.
Her current novel, Under the Pale Moon, is due for release in Fall 2015. Set in
post-World War II Monterey, California, it explores the relationship of a
married woman breaking the bonds of conformity, and a combat nurse haunted by
the ghosts of war.
She is a member of the Historical
Novel Society, Women Writing the West and Romance Writers of America.
Links
Twitter: @kimrtaylor
Book
Excerpts
February, 1883
DOWN THE STREET STRODE a young
woman, who could have been anywhere between thirteen and twenty. She didn’t
know her own age, so she had decided on sixteen. She was not pretty, nor was
she plain. Her hair was brown, not dirty and not clean, and she kept it in a
loose bun. Her eyebrows were dark and full, and from beneath them, her
winter-gray eyes missed nothing. A matchstick hung from the corner of her mouth,
and every so often she shifted it to the other side, then back again to its
original spot. She had been told by several do-gooders at several charity
houses that this was a reprehensible habit, which was why she never stopped
doing it.
Her dress was neither this year’s
fashion nor the last; it was patched in places, and frayed along the bottom.
The material was coarse brown cotton, solid and indifferent. With each step,
the young woman, whose name was Mollie Flynn, admired the black sheen of her
new boots. Mollie was quite proud of them. She’d pinched them a week earlier
from Friedrich’s Secondhand Shop on Chambers Street. They were bright as black
could be, and she polished them every night to keep them so.
An Elevated train rattled above,
drowning out the rat-a-tat from the shooting gallery, the shouts of drivers as
they jockeyed their carts and horses for a bit of space, the competing songs of
violins and out-of-tune pianos floating from saloon doorways.
She walked by an old woman in an
alcove, selling buttons she’d probably picked out of trash bins. Another woman
trundled slowly past, a huge pile of fabric balanced on her head. Two boys
played hoops and sticks, laughing and shouting to each other. The boys’
laughter, the woman’s determined footfall, the call to buy buttons, the
wheedling song of pullers-in trying to tempt passersby into the billiard room,
the dancehall, the used-jewelry store, the pawnshop—the rhythm made Mollie
dizzy.
At Maud Riley’s vegetable stand,
a tall man bargained over a rather measly cabbage. He nodded, a deal struck,
then fumbled in the inside pocket of his coat for his wallet. Maud wrapped two
cabbages and a few potatoes in newspaper and pulled a bit of twine tight.
Mollie sucked a bit on her
matchstick and narrowed her eyes. She wasn’t looking at Maud Riley’s slaughter
of a poor cabbage. She was watching the man’s wallet, which flapped open, hung
about, and generally looked like it was going to jump right out of his
incompetent fingers.
Now that, Mollie thought, would be
the easiest wallet to pinch in the world.
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