THE COURTESAN'S DAUGHTER

Dunlap presents a mother-and-daughter drama set in the era of early silent movies.

It’s 1910, and 17-year-old Sylvie Button and her mother, Justine have been keeping secrets from each other. When Sylvie was a small child, the pair left Paris, establishing a new life in New York City. Justine found employment as a piecework seamstress, raising Sylvie as a single mother while working out of a tenement apartment in Lower Manhattan. She’s never told Sylvie anything about her father, nor about the circumstances surrounding their hasty exit from France. Meanwhile, Sylvie, a top student who’s on track to receive a teaching scholarship, has begun fantasizing about a future that will disrupt Justine’s carefully laid plans for her; she longs to work in the burgeoning silent movie industry and perhaps even become like the famous young woman she sees onscreen at the nickelodeon: “I didn’t fall in love with the Vitagraph girl. I wanted to be the Vitagraph girl.” It’s a dream she shares with Paolo Bonnano, a handsome Italian man whom she meets at church one Sunday. Paolo convinces her to have pictures taken by a professional photographer who owes him a favor. When Sylvie returns home after a photoshoot, she finds Justine in the arms of a strange man and runs away from home with Paolo, who’s running away for other reasons; they find themselves in the middle of a wicked blizzard that’s hit the city. Dunlap’s melodrama is narrated in alternating chapters by Sylvie and Justine, their voices full of youthful determination and world-weary suspicion, respectively. The story can be overly melodramatic at times, but it offers an enjoyable peek behind the scenes of early moviemaking, with much of the story taking place in the Vitagraph Studio in Brooklyn, where many original 10-minute silent shorts were filmed. A bit of adventure and danger keep the action moving at a steady clip, and readers will also be intrigued by the evolving friendship between Justine and her employer, Aaron Silverstein.

A pleasantly engaging and evocative historical novel with strong main characters.