From 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 naïve adolescent into a woman in his provocative story.
(Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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In 1918, thousands of U.S. women were detained on suspicion of having venereal diseases. It was thought that these women would infect U.S. soldiers and thus harm the war effort. Lowenthal's novel imagines the plight of one such woman, 17-year-old Frieda Mintz. Frieda has left her repressive mother and an arranged marriage to an older man for the glamour of the big city. One impulsive night with an infected soldier costs Frieda her job and eventually her freedom. Once imprisoned, she meets a somewhat stereotypical cast of women, including fast-talking prostitutes and a manipulative lesbian who misuses her authority in an attempted seduction. Although an appended author's note draws parallels between this little-known chapter in American history and the present wars on terror and AIDS, the connections are not implicit in the text. This is an interesting, if flawed, fictional introduction to a disturbing part of our history.
Marta SegalCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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