'Girls sold matches and pins, then flowers and hot corn, and then themselves,' she tells us. As in all good fairy tales, the orphaning marks the beginning of the real story: Lower Manhattan is the heart of darkness for a motherless girl of no means. When she finally escapes, her discovery that her mother has deserted their home is all the more harrowing. There's more than a shading of Dickensian cruelty in Moth's stay at the Wentworth household, and she endures it with heartbreaking resolve to support her mother. One summer night, Moth is awakened and sold away. Mama, streetwise but self-indulgent, nursing a broken heart with bottles of Dr.

It's not that Moth is blind to her fate – Mama hints broadly that their salvation hinges on Moth's successful appointment as a maid to the wealthy – but Moth figures on 13. Still, the 12-year-old, given her name by her capricious and since-decamped father, shares a lumpy straw mattress in a tenement with her fortune-telling Mama and dreams of a life she glimpses through windows in the neighbourhoods north of Houston. She is female, part Gypsy and born into abject poverty in 1871 Manhattan, so her prospects are dim. It was, and still is in some parts of Africa, where the myth endures as a cure for AIDS, a uniquely female tragedy.Įnter Moth. This time, she examines power imbalances between the sexes through the prism of the so-called virgin cure for syphilis, an insidious 19th-century myth with no socio-economic boundaries and a trail of human wreckage: If the thought of a wealthy older man procuring sex with a girl weren't repugnant enough, there is the real and present danger that she could die from it. It was a winning formula that she continues to favour in a new novel that also shares thematic territory with

Ami McKay's first bestselling novel was a trove of period ephemera, her own narrative playing off juicy snippets from newspapers, magazine ads and herbalist lore.

The virgin cure book