The Reluctant Canary Sings

Bobbi Bowen lives in Cleveland. It’s 1937 in the second dip of a double-dip depression. When she leaves the apartment, she passes the Holy Rosary soup kitchen, with its straggle of shuffling men and women in their bedraggled coats. Most days she hums the new swing tunes—Cream Puff or Sing, Sing, Sing— because it seems every time she turns the radio on, she hears about another dismembered body left lying around town. At home, she ducks her parents’ fights—sometimes ducking a flying plate or saucer. So when the bank cuts her mother’s hours, she’s got one chance to keep a roof over her family’s heads—to turn her voice, her most private pleasure, into a public commodity. At the end of her sophomore year, she forever gives up her dream of art school to spend her nights singing in nightclubs. Even though she’s able to make enough to support her family, security remains an illusion she can’t seem to capture no matter how hard she tries. Is she making herself bait? Will her father’s betrayal destroy her?