THE FALLEN WOMAN'S DAUGHTER

A teenage girl impulsively decides to run away with a smooth-talking carnival barker in Cox’s novel.

In the April of 1932, 8-year-old Leonora (Nora) DeLorenzo and her younger sister, Patricia (Patsy), have just been taken away from their mother, Gertie DeLorenzo, and placed in The Park Ridge School for Girls outside Chicago. Gertie has been deemed an unfit mother, accused by a neighbor of being a prostitute and leaving her young children alone in their small apartment. Every other Sunday, the girls wait for Gertie to show up on visiting day, hoping she will bring them back home—but they are bitterly disappointed each time. The narrative jumps back to 1923: Gertie Gufftason is a restless teenager, one of her parents’ 11 children living in the ramshackle southern Iowan mining town of Keystone. The carnival has come to town, and the star performer is country singer Patsy Montana, who Gertie idolizes. As her parents and siblings go off in different directions, Gertie begins roaming the campgrounds on her own. She is approached by the exotic carnival barker “Lorenzo,” who offers to introduce her to Patsy Montana. Dazzled by the excitement of the carnival and Lorenzo’s carefully designed seduction, Gertie takes off with him when the carnival leaves town. Cox has woven a complex emotional melodrama filled with passion, betrayal, heartbreak, and, ultimately, forgiveness. She deftly captures the poverty and social signals of the Depression (“Keystone wasn’t even a real town, just a ramshackle collection of buildings surrounding a dirty hole in the ground, no different than any other of the many mining camps scattered across southern Iowa”), along with the psychological damage sustained by Nora and Patsy resulting from Gertie’s choices. Nora is the story’s hero, the strongest of the three female protagonists, always protecting the traumatized Patsy from the consequences of Gertie’s misbehavior during the decade they spend at Park Ridge, where punishments are frequent and cruel. A satisfying surprise revelation close to the novel’s end almost compensates for the rolling cascade of tragedies.

An unsettling tale, often depressing, but nonetheless an addictive read.