Love and Other Consolation Prizes by Jamie Ford
If you are familiar with author Jamie Ford’s work then you
know he finds the smallest nugget of a long forgotten story and brings it to us
on a platter. In this, his newest, we are
taken to the Seattle World’s Fair in 1909. I think we forget in this age of
access-to-everything that there was a time when the World’s Fairs brought the
newest and strangest and most exciting of the future to our doors.
Ernest Young is twelve years old and half Chinese. He is living in an orphan home and it has
been decided that he must go. When
Ernest is given a ticket to the fair he thinks he won the best prize ever but
when he arrives he discovers he is the prize.
He is to be raffled off to anyone, hopefully to someone willing to give
him a good home.
Ernest is rescued, so to speak, when the madam of a high
class brothel takes him home to be house boy to the girls. He certainly has an interesting life, makes
friends of Maisie, the madam’s daughter, and Fahn, a maid, and becomes
invaluable to the brothel.
As it becomes evident the occupational hazards of being a
madam in a brothel have taken hold, their world begins to come apart. Loyalties, futures, first loves, all must be
acknowledged.
We are being told this story by Ernest fifty years after the
fact, and that, too, is an important element.
There is nothing not to like in a
Jamie Ford book.
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