Charity Girl
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Same Embrace: A “lively and illuminating” novel that explores a little-known chapter of World War I history (The Washington Post Book World).
Frieda Mintz refused her mother’s plan to marry her off to an older, wealthy man. Now she’s determined to make her own way in the world—and find love on her own terms. Earning her keep in a Boston department store, she spends her nights in the dance halls, intoxicated by her newfound freedom and the patriotic fervor of the day. That is, until her soldier beau reports her as his last sexual contact, sweeping her up in the government’s wartime crusade against venereal disease.
Soon, Frieda is quarantined in a detention center, forced into manual labor, and subjected to questionable cures. But she finds comfort among those around her, including an incorrigible woman of the night and a sympathetic social worker, as they all seek to build a new kind of independence.
At once a horrifying exposé of a dark period in US history and an unexpectedly hopeful story of desire, identity, and righteousness, Charity Girl is a stunningly researched and expertly crafted work of literature, guaranteed to enrapture even as it enrages.
“Lively and illuminating . . . marrying the facts of history with the details that make a fictional life come alive.” —Anita Shreve, The Washington Post Book World
“A lively, emotion-laden novel of an irrepressible young woman’s punishment for rebelling against upbringing and society.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Expect to be drawn into this absorbing page-turner.” —USA Today
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Focusing on a little-known WWI-era government campaign to imprison women who'd contracted "social diseases," Lowenthal (The Same Embrace; Avoidance) follows the travails of a 17-year-old Boston girl as she's put through the system's wringer. Frieda Mintz is a bundle wrapper at a department store living on her own when she meets Felix Morse, an army private. After a date at a Red Sox game, they sleep together. Not long after, Mrs. Sprague from the "Committee on Prevention of Social Evils Surrounding Military Camps," hounds Frieda at her workplace because Felix, during an inspection that uncovers he has an infection, names Frieda as his "last contact." After her case of "the whites" flares up and she loses her job, Frieda follows Felix to Camp Devens, where she's arrested and put into quarantine. Behind bars, she befriends Flossie Collins, and the two are sent to a detention camp, where they undergo crude medical treatment and perform mandatory manual labor alongside a host of other quarantined women. As her body heals and conditions worsen at the detention center, tensions rise to a wrenching climax. Lowenthal ably captures the transformation of a na ve adolescent into a woman in his provocative story.
