2014 Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults
Josie Moraine doesn't have it easy. The teenaged daughter of a New Orleans prosititute, 1950 seems to start much the same way for her as any other day - help clean at Willie's brothel, stay out of the way of her mother, work at the bookstore she lives above, then go to bed and do it all again the next day. She dreams of heading off to college and leaving her mother, the brothel, and her inauspicious past behind. But when a wealthy tourist who came into her bookstore earlier that day winds up dead mere hours after she hears that Cincinnati, the good-for-nothing low life her mother is still in love with even after he beat her the last time they tangoed, is back in town, she finds herself pulled into the murder investigation. And it definitely doesn't help that she finds the deceased's watch in her mother's room at the brothel.
Out of the Easy reads less like historical fiction and more like pulp fiction, and I love it for it. Josie's world isn't exactly seedy, but there's enough of that element to add a bit of a noir feel to the mystery at hand. But it isn't exactly a mystery, either. While the murder is the thread that runs through the story, the goal isn't necessarily to figure out what exactly happened, but to find out how Josie, her mother, and everyone else in their lives may or may not play a part in it. Meanwhile, she becomes more determined than ever to get into college, finds that her friend and coworker Patrick needs her support more than ever in dealing with his father's dementia, and juggles her potential growing feelings towards him and Jesse, an amateur mechanic with a bit of a bad-boy vibe. Josie might not have had a great start in life, but she's used that to adapt and survive, and the people in her life that love her have all contributed to that. Ruta Sepetys does a fantastic job creating a New Orleans that's vibrant and teeming with lots of great characters.
(Read as part of YALSA's Hub Reading Challenge.)
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