Dime by E. R. Frank (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Dime by E. R. Frank
Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4814-3160-6 $17.99
E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4814-3162-0 $10.99 R Gr. 10-12
Dime is a smart, thirteen-year-old, book-obsessed African-American girl whose foster mother has kicked her out. She wanders the street until a girl named L.A. invites her home, where Dime meets a handsome man they call Daddy, whose attention turns her head and fills an ache in her love-starved heart. When he tells her that the price of staying and occasionally having sex with him is turning tricks, she gives in. Daddy goes after some real money by bringing in a ten-year-old girl named Lollipop, who has lived her entire life in a room doing all her innocent little girl activities naked in front of a live internet feed and is now deemed ready to entertain customers. Dime casts about for a way to tell people what’s going on so that they will listen without being repulsed. Taking her cue from books she’s read, she tries Sex as a narrator, then Money, then Truth, before finally giving up and making a simple plea that Lollipop’s baby, whom she was forced to deliver so that Daddy could sell it, get a better story than her own. This is as gut-wrenching [End Page 21] as it sounds, reminiscent in its raw power of Sapphire’s Push. Dime is an elegant storyteller whether she is speaking in her own voice or the abstract narrators she has chosen, each giving a different spin on the horrors of slavery and the sex industry in contemporary culture. Daddy is as charming in the beginning as he is vile, and Dime’s self-recrimination—“I chose”—is as heartbreaking as her slow realization that she was tricked into believing he thought she was special. To readers, though, she is never anything but; her passion for books, her desperate need for love, and the numbing resignation that drives her to courageous action make her a hero who can’t fail to make readers open their eyes, no matter how searing the vision may be.
