Stevie‘s review of Dollface: A Novel of the Roaring Twenties by Renee Rosen
Historical Crime Fiction published by NAL 05 Nov 13
Romance this ain’t. Sure, the heroine gets hot and heavy with two men from opposite sides of the Chicago mobster divide, but you just know things aren’t going to end well for anyone: not for Vera, not for her men, and not for the majority of her friends and their men. They’re all struggling to make a better life for themselves, but don’t always go for the most sensible options in the process.
Vera is a young Jewish woman living in prohibition-era Chicago and trying to make her own way in the world, rather than working back at her family’s slaughterhouse business – run by her mother ever since Vera’s father was murdered when she was four. Vera resents her mother for seeming to care more about the business than about her daughter and has gone to the city with her best friend, Evelyn – who feels overlooked by her family and constantly compared unfavourably with her four older sisters.
The two women work as typists, but Vera has to take a second job in order to make ends meet. Not that shortage of funds stops either of them from going out drinking and dancing, and before long they have both met men with rather shady occupations. Evelyn’s man doesn’t always treat her well, but Vera finds she has the opposite problem. Two men, one Jewish and the other Italian, with separate affiliations to the two gangs fighting for supremacy in Chicago’s underworld, take an interest in her, and she can’t decide which man she prefers.
Vera and Evelyn are drawn deeper and deeper into the world of illegal alcohol deals and gang violence, befriending the wives and girlfriends of other mobsters. While they know it’s dangerous, neither is willing to give up the luxuries their men can provide for them. Eventually Vera falls pregnant and marries one of her men, but can’t stop seeing the other, especially when her husband is arrested and imprisoned. The violence escalates, and the women do whatever they can to survive, although Vera tries to carve out a corner of normality in her life by joining the Jewish Women’s Council and leading one of their fundraising drives. Meanwhile, it’s only a matter of time before Al Capone’s gang has its St. Valentine’s Day showdown with the members of the North Side Gang, an event that will change everyone’s lives irrevocably.
Written in the first person and narrated by Vera throughout, this book has a wonderful voice and keeps me guessing right until the very end. It’s a bittersweet ending too, although I don’t see how the events could have unfolded any other way and kept faithful to the spirit of the times and to the characters. Definitely an author to look out for again in the future.
Grade: A
Summary:
America in the 1920s was a country alive with the wild fun of jazz, speakeasies, and a new kind of woman—the flapper.
Vera Abramowitz is determined to leave her gritty childhood behind and live a more exciting life, one that her mother never dreamed of. Bobbing her hair and showing her knees, the lipsticked beauty dazzles, doing the Charleston in nightclubs and earning the nickname “Dollface.”
As the ultimate flapper, Vera captures the attention of two high rollers, a handsome nightclub owner and a sexy gambler. On their arms, she gains entrée into a world filled with bootleg bourbon, wailing jazz, and money to burn. She thinks her biggest problem is choosing between them until the truth comes out. Her two lovers are really mobsters from rival gangs during Chicago’s infamous Beer Wars, a battle Al Capone refuses to lose.
The heady life she’s living is an illusion resting on a bedrock of crime and violence unlike anything the country has ever seen before. When the good times come to an end, Vera becomes entangled in everything from bootlegging to murder. And as men from both gangs fall around her, Vera must put together the pieces of her shattered life, as Chicago hurtles toward one of the most infamous days in its history, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
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