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The madam : a novel / Julianna Baggott.

by Baggott, Julianna.

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Atria Books, c2003.

Mothers and daughters -- Fiction.

Prostitutes -- Fiction.

Female friendship -- Fiction.

Florida -- Fiction.

viii, 296 p. ; 23 cm.

"It's 1924 in an industrial town in West Virginia. Alma works in a hosiery mill where the percussive roar of machinery has far too long muffled the engine that is her heart. When her husband decides that they should set out to find their fortune in Florida, Alma is torn. Ultimately she agrees and they leave behind their three children, a boarding house of show people, a dead vaudeville bear, and Alma's ailing mother. But their fragile marriage soon collapses. Abandoned by her husband on a Miami dock, Alma is suddenly forced to make her own way in the world. With the help of a gentle giantess and an opium-addicted prostitute, Alma reclaims her children, forging a new family, and commits herself to a life set apart from the world she knows. She chooses to run a whore house, a harvest that relies on lust and weakness of which "the world has a generous, unending supply." As her children grow older, however, Alma's love for them becomes desperate -- especially for her daughter Lettie, who, at fifteen, disappears. Alma draws on the fierce strength of the unlikely cast of women around her, and the novel careens to its shocking, redemptive, unforgettable ending."--Inside jacket.

Historical fiction.

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