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Fiction. Literature. HTML: The best-selling author of Girl Waits with Gun and Lady Cop Makes Trouble continues her extraordinary journey into the real lives of the forgotten but fabulous Kopp sisters. Deputy sheriff Constance Kopp is outraged to see young women brought into the Hackensack jail over dubious charges of waywardness, incorrigibility, and moral depravity. The strong-willed, patriotic Edna Heustis, who left home to work in a munitions factory, certainly doesn't belong behind bars. And sixteen-year-old runaway Minnie Davis, with few prospects and fewer friends, shouldn't be publicly shamed and packed off to a state-run reformatory. But such were the laws-and morals-of 1916. Constance uses her authority as deputy sheriff, and occasionally exceeds it, to investigate and defend these women when no one else will. But it's her sister Fleurette who puts Constance's beliefs to the test and forces her to reckon with her own ideas of how a young woman should and shouldn't behave. Against the backdrop of World War I, and drawn once again from the true story of the Kopp sisters, Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions is a spirited, page-turning story that will delight fans of historical fiction and lighthearted detective fiction alike..… (more)
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I can't believe that I left this Miss Kopp languish in my TBR pile for so long! I adore the characters , writing style, and historical exploration in this series. In this one, Constance
Narrator Christina Moore is excellent in her audio interpretation.
Her prisoners include Edna, a young woman who believes the United States will be pulled into the war in Europe (the year is 1916) and, wanting to make a contribution, runs away from home to work in a munitions plant. Minnie, 16, runs away from home with a man who promises to marry her but doesn't. Her parents don't want her back, and now she faces years in a reformatory until she reaches adulthood.
Constance must really put her convictions to the test, however, when 18-year-old Fleurette, her youngest sister (actually her own daughter from being seduced as a teenager), runs away from home to join a vaudeville troupe. Her other sister, Norma, wants to bring Fleurette back by force, if necessary. Constance is torn.
Stewart bases her novels not just on a real person but on actual newspaper accounts from the period. Much of what takes place in Miss Kopp's “Midnight Confessions” actually happened, as Stewart shows at the end of the book. Her fiction fills in the blanks with remarkable success.
I have been impressed by each of the Constance Kopp adventures so far and look forward to reading the next one.
So go in with the right mindset, and you might enjoy it more. But I kept expecting the narrative to swerve into something dramatic, and that failed to happen. (I suspect if the author gave herself freedom to extrapolate even more, it would solve the problem—she made May Ward a lush without any evidence to support it, surely she could have tossed in an actual white slavery ring rather than several non-rings)!
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).
Some background for those unfamiliar with the books: This series is based on the life of Constance Kopp, one of
While the first two books had, more or less, a single story line as the focus, ...Midnight Confessions is more a collection of smaller stories, each centered on a real person and event, that Stewart has woven together into a cohesive narrative.
All of these smaller stories have a single theme: the very real vulnerabilities women had, and the rights they didn't. We're all vaguely aware that society really frowned upon "loose morals" – a state unique to women, as men weren't expected to have any morals – and we've all made jokes about the "morality police", but when you read about a woman over 18 who is arrested because she left home to move into a strict, all-female boarding house to work in a powder factory so she could contribute to the war effort...well we've certainly come a long way in 100 years. Waywardness this was called - and guess who brought the charges against her? Her mother.
Anyway, there are a few characters in this book that all have to face this lack of agency, whether they deserve the charges against them or not. (Deserve, as in guilty or innocent of the charges, not morally deserving.) All of their stories play out over the course of the book, but there's no sense of tension or climax. Some might find that disappointing, but it worked really well for me; it kept the pace snappy, and I didn't feel like Stewart was manufacturing drama for the sake of drama. I was able to enjoy and appreciate these women's stories on their own merit; if she'd tried to twist them and manipulate them to create some fictional plot, I doubt I'd have liked the book half as much.
She ends the book with an election year just beginning and an inevitable shake-up in the local politics. I'm looking forward to the next book, scheduled for September, to see what happens to Constance and Sheriff Heath.
This book deals with families, mothers, fathers, husbands, whoever,
While there are some serious issues going on and being dealt with in this book, I had a lot of laughs as well. Constance is forever getting marriage proposals when the papers write about this "new woman deputy". Some of the letters are downright hilarious.
A fun, interesting and highly entertaining read for me.
Thanks to Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt and Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.
The audiobook narrator is wonderful.
It was frustrating to think that females were treated the way they were in the mid-1910's. I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about the history of women's rights, but didn't realize quite how bad things were in the early 20th century for young women who wanted to move out and make lives for themselves. Of course, at that time, women couldn't even vote and elect officials who might improve their lot.
This book was obtained through my public library.