About the book

Author: McKay, Ami

Title: The virgin cure

Publication: Toronto : Knopf Canada, 2010. ISBN 9780676979565.

DAISY audio format narrated by Jennifer Coffey. CELA library call number DA41472. 368 pages in the hardcover edition; 9 hrs., 30 mins. as a recorded book.

About the story

I read Ami McKay’s first book, The birth House, many years ago and loved it. This is her second novel.

Set in New York city in 1871, the book follows the life of a young girl named Moth who lives in poverty with her mother on Christie Street, a poor area without sewers where people live in squalor as they can and die when they can no longer hold the tatters of their lives together.

In this rough world, the young girl, who dreams of an easier life, is first sold by her mother as a servant and then bought by a Madam. She meets a sympathetic doctor and finds a new life.

The title makes reference to the belief that, to rid oneself of syphillis, a man must deflower a virgin. This dreadful belief was common at the time, and is still believed in some parts of the world (only now they think it cures AIDS).

There is sex and violence, and it’s not always easy to read, but this is a very good book indeed. At the time, New York city had over 30,000 orphans living catch-as-catch-can, often falling into a life of crime. They were considered vermin, non-human rubbish to be swept aside. Eventually, programmes for “indigent women and children” helped to address this crisis. This story is set at the very earliest beginning of this time, when to be a “fallen woman” (or the child of one) was to practically seal one’s fate as a victim of society, poverty and disease.

The narrator, Jennifer Coffey, read with just the right kind of neutrality to let the words speak for themselves. I have heard her before, in Susan Juby’s The Woefield Poultry Collective. She has recorded 23 books on the CELA website: remarkable. I really enjoy her reading!

Recommended?

Recommended with the caveat that there is strong language, sex and violence.