Gail Godwin, Queen of the Underworld

Queen of the Underworld

Gail Godwin

Ballantine, Jan 2007, $14.95

ISBN: 0345483197

In 1959, having just graduated college and unable to stay under the domineering control of her parents, Emma Gant leaves North Carolina by train to start as a reporter at the Miami Star at a time when the southern city is a hotbed of Cuban exiles. Adding enticement to her self-imposed exile to southern Florida is that her married lover, Miami Beach nightclub owner Paul Nightingale, lives there.

In Miami, she takes a room at the Julia Tuttle Hotel where Emma meets Cuban families who fled Castro's revolution. Life is exciting for Emma as she learns how to be a real journalist mentored by professionals at the Star and much about Cuba before and during the Castro conquest. Struggling with influences that pull at the young reporter, Emma meets a horde of people impacted by Castro's Communist revolution, especially a non-journalist, life mentor, former madam Ginevra Brown, THE QUEEN OF THE UNDERWORLD.

This is an interesting look at Miami at a time of turmoil that turned the city and much of Southern Florida upside down. The support cast is solid and eccentric adding a touch of time and place to what the rookie reporter observes as everyday people doing non-ordinary tasks. The heroine is also well-drawn as more of an observer who has broken the prime directive of not getting involved in the story. However, the influx of sidebars like segments in Spanish and newspaper articles may augment the realism, but disrupts the flow of the storyline though overall Gail Godwin provides a fine look at 1960s Miami.

Harriet Klausner