Carissa is one of the strongest female MCs that I have read about in a long time. Her mother works in a brothel and is being drugged by the Madam Miss Lucille in order to keep her under control. As long as her mother still needs her “medicine,” they cannot leave this abusive woman. And anyone that gets in Miss Lucille’s way is usually mysteriously killed. Carissa thinks that they might have a chance to get away from her in Arizona, but she has to secretly be able to nurse her mother back to health. That’s where China Mary comes in, a Chinese woman who runs the town and who is the only one with access to the drug that her mother is on. If she can get her help, they might be able to slowly help her mom get better.
This book was quite a unique story about the silver-mining past of Arizona, and I quite enjoyed reading it. The 1800s were a time when many women were forced to rely on men for their livelihoods. But all of the women in this story paint another picture. The men may have been in the mines, but those who ran the brothels took the money that they made from their work. China Mary was a real person, and she did control jobs for the Chinese immigrant workers in her town. She controlled much of the gambling, opium dealing, and even ran her own store on the side. To read about such a powerful woman was truly awesome. Even Miss Lucille was a powerful character, even though she used her control to hurt others rather than to help them.
The characters in this story were all full of life. Carissa was definitely an inspirational young girl, and her mother must have been one too. The mother definitely had Carissa at a young age, and I would have loved to have read her story before she came to work for Miss Lucille. All the people that Carissa meets during her time that she talks with China Mary were some of my favorite characters, but I won’t discuss them here as they have major spoilers.
The book started off very quickly as we learned about all the different characters and their journey to Tombstone, Arizona. I was hooked and was speeding through the book. My only complaint was that the ending felt rushed. Everything up until the ending was moving along speedily, but then the last 10% seemed to try to cover too much information. This was the only thing that brought my rating down from 5 stars to 4 stars, everything else seemed to be perfectly fine.
I would recommend this book as a YA historical fiction read. Even though the character is 12, this book definitely deals with some heavy topics that I think would be more fitting for older teens to read.
I received a copy of this book and this is my voluntary review.
Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 books.
