TEN CENTS A DANCE

Fletcher offers a hard-boiled work of historical fiction that captures America’s social struggles at the beginning of World War II. Sixteen-year-old Ruby secretly works as a taxi dancer, jitterbugging with men for money, to get her family out of Chicago’s slums. Ruby’s neighborhood, The Yards, looms with its gritty tenements, sooty windows and ever-present stink. Like all the characters in this novel, Ruby feels cornered by circumstance and desperate to escape. As a taxi dancer, her innocence quickly fades. Right and wrong blur, her customers’ kisses grow more frequent and she falls for a small-time gangster. Ruby enters a very adult world—one full of haggard broads, dirty old men, booze, jazz clubs and low-cut gowns. Many teens might not be able to follow. Ruby’s nerve and sass make her a distinctive character, however, and she brings the language, rhythms and social changes of the 1940s alive. (Historical fiction. YA)