Last Dance on Holladay Street

Children's Literature

Life is not easy on the plains of Colorado in 1878. Especially for a "colored" family living among rural whites. But Eva Wilkins has no complaints and is happy living with Daddy Walter and Mama Kate. Then Eva's world slowly begins to crumble. Daddy Walter dies, and Mama Kate soon follows. Before she dies, Mama Kate reassures Eva that she will watch over her from heaven, and Eva promises to make Mama Kate glad. Now, with no one to take her in, and armed only with a yellowing envelope with a fading return address, thirteen-year-old Eva sets out for Denver to find the woman who gave her up at birth. Big surprises await her. When she arrives at 518 Holladay Street she discovers that Sadie Lewis, her birth mother, is white. Not only that but the house where she lives is a brothel, one of those "houses of sin" filled with "fallen women" that the preacher talked about back home. What will Eva do now? Will she become "one of them" in order to survive? Or will she take matters into her own hands? Eva is only sure of one thing—Mama Kate would not be glad. This book, exploring the exploitation of women on the western frontier, is sure to please the fans of historical fiction. 2005, Random House Children's Books Ages 12 up.
—Pat Trattles

School Library Journal

Gr 8 Up-The only world that 13-year-old Eva Wilkins has ever known is her quiet life on the Colorado prairie with Daddy Walter and Mama Kate. But now that they have both died, her only option is to go live with the mother who gave her up at birth. She makes her first trip to Denver all alone and is wide-eyed with astonishment at all the people and buildings. But she is more shocked when she learns that her mother is a prostitute in a well-to-do brothel on notorious Holladay Street, and, even more, that her mother's skin is white, while Eva's is coffee-colored. After she is put to work dancing with the customers for a quarter each, she knows that she has to escape Holladay Street before she is forced to "work upstairs." Carbone's novel portrays the harsh realities of the options for single women in the late-Victorian era in the United States without graphic sexual references. The desperation and anguish these women feel are well wrought and palpable as they are largely portrayed as victims of circumstance. The only element that seems to be missing is the establishment of the racial climate for a young girl who is half black and half white. And yet this book works well on two levels: it is a good historical picture of life in the city and the country of the late 1800s, and it is also a triumph of the female spirit over the oppressive choices women sometimes face.-Anna M. Nelson, Collier County Public Library, Naples, FL Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Spurred by the deaths of her foster parents, a 13-year-old finds the mother who gave her away-and why-in this tale from the Old West. A double shock awaits Eva at the Denver address she's been given: Not only is her mother Sadie white, she's a prostitute-a profession which Carbone clearly defines while deftly skipping the actual details. With nowhere else to go, Eva reluctantly takes up residence at the "sporting house," becoming a private dancer to earn her keep under the tutelage of Pearl, her hostile, newly met half-sister, and discovering the horrifying web of debt and prejudice under which everyone in the house is trapped. The author skips what goes on behind that house's closed doors, but she recreates both the town in 1878, and its male-dominated society, with vivid realism. Though Eva conveniently finds kind-hearted adults stepping in at need to rescue her from both human and animal predators, in the end she does figure out a cleverly credible way to make an honest living for her, Sadie and Pearl. (author's note) (Fiction. 11-13)