Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys (review)

Josie has lived for years in New Orleans, where her mother works as a prostitute for madam Willie Woodley. Now that it's 1950 and she's seventeen, Josie is virtually on her own for years, living above a bookstore in a tiny apartment provided by the shop owner and now run by his twenty-one-year-old son. Although Josie's on decent terms with Willie and even cleans the brothel in the morning, she knows she won't follow her mother's career path. She has some money saved for college, and a chance meeting with a Smith College student convinces her that she may have a shot at admission and scholarship money. Just when it seems her ticket out is all but stamped, however, her mother's involvement with a two-bit criminal threatens to dash her plans; she may have to turn tricks to pay her mother's debt to a mafia kingpin and recoup the savings her mother has stolen. Will Josie succumb to a fate worse than death? Of course not, and the time-honored theme plays out predictably, with a substantially romanticized take on prostitution and a full cast of tainted good guys and gals ready to bail our heroine at every turn. Of just such fluff, though, are guilty pleasures made, and there's no denying that readers will dog Josie's every step through the Vieux Carré.