- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Atria Books (September 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0743475992
- ISBN-13: 978-0743475990
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
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Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Baggott again explores family dysfunction in this fictionalized account of her own great-grandmother's bordello in 1920s West Virginia, though the mannered style is a departure from the darkly comic tone of her previous novels (The Miss America Family, etc.). Alma and Henry can barely feed their three children-responsible Irving, slow-witted Willard, nervous Lettie-despite their grueling jobs, hers in a hosiery factory, his in a railroad yard. So when a bootlegging scam artist lends them money to buy a trunk containing "unclaimed goods from a ship of rich folks" down in Florida, Alma and Henry are desperate enough to quit their jobs and head south. The scheme doesn't pan out, and Henry announces he won't be returning home. Panicked, Alma heads back to West Virginia, picking up a giantess named Roxy along the way. Together with an opium-addicted former prostitute named Delphine, the women devise a plan to make money: Alma will open a whorehouse, Delphine will preside as "queen" and Roxy will keep the men in line. This arrangement sits beautifully with Alma's no-nonsense child-rearing philosophy ("What would [the children] learn among whores? Practicality"). But when Lettie turns 15, Alma is unprepared for her daughter's rebelliousness and turns to an unlikely source to save the girl's life. Despite its titillating theme and quirky supporting characters, this is a rather standard kitchen-sink drama. Baggott weighs down the story with pretentious, awkward, vaguely folksy expressions ("he looks mannerable"; "she is desirous of the change she feels"; "Alma hears a car rattle to a bereft exhale"). Fans of her readable, charming earlier novels may be mystified.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
In her two popular previous novels, Girl Talk (2000) and The Miss America Family [BKL F 15 02], Baggott skewers contemporary American domesticity with quirky humor. She now journeys back in her own family history to forge a tale as awesome and menacing as a hurricane. Marrowtown, West Virginia, during the 1920s and 1930s is a gritty place of backbreaking labor, moonshine, scam artists, abandoned children, men who beat women, and women who fight back. Haunted by a miserable childhood, Alma is overwhelmed by the demands of her husband and three children and utterly exhausted by her factory job and the work of running a boardinghouse. Finally abandoned by her weak-willed mate, she rejects the unjust world of thankless toil and starts her own business, a brothel. Baggott's insights into the selling of sex and women's depthless capacity for improvisation in the fight to survive and to defend their loved ones are galvanizing in their intensity and drama, and her cathartic and commanding novel is a provocative paean to unconventionality, unexpected alliances, courage, and autonomy. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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First Sentence
Before there can be a murderous heart, or, for that matter, before there can be a whorehouse, an orphanage, a dank trunk with rusted hinges, there must first be a hosiery mill. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Before there can be a murderous heart, or, for that matter, before there can be a whorehouse, an orphanage, a dank trunk with rusted hinges, there must first be a hosiery mill. Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Unreadable,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Madam (Hardcover)
I had never read anything by Julianna Baggott prior to my unfortunate encounter with The Madam. I certainly won't bother with anything else she's written. I find it appalling that a writer who, according to information on the book jacket, has written both prose and poetry for various reputable publications, not only has a generally poor grasp of English grammar, but is unaware that "noisome" means "putrid" or "malodorous," and not "noisy," which is what, based on the context in which the word appears, Baggott clearly assumed it meant. And did anyone bother to PROOFREAD this book for such malapropisms--as well as its numerous grammatical inaccuracies? If the usage in this novel is a reflection of what is happening generally to the English language, then we are in serious trouble. Prose like this is, as far as I am concerned, unreadable by a truly literate public.
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Madam is a poetic, headlong rush of a story,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Madam (Hardcover)
Everything I've loved in Baggott's other novels, Girl Talk and The Miss America Family--is here, but with a sense of place and time that draws you in from page one. There's the wild, off-kilter characters, desperation brimming just under deliberately tough exteriors, the family flung apart by circumstance and reconstituted into something altogether new, unexpected and yet exactly as it should be. The language is lush and evocative--as another reviewer said, you can tell a poet is at work here (Baggott's This Country of Mothers is an award-winning book of poetry and a must-read), but it's completely to serve the story, which culminates in a tense and powerful scene of a family saving itself. Baggott has taken on new territory here and made it her own.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing,
By
This review is from: The Madam (Hardcover)
This story of a Madam in 1930's West Virginia has a meandering plot and poorly developed characters, except for maybe Alma. The story behind Alma is not that well developed, and the setting and story are not particularly evocative. I was rather disappointed.
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