Joan Thursday - Louis Joseph Vance

Minor potboiler is a change of pace from the author of the Lone Wolf detective series. Tenement beauty (and wannabe stage-star) Joan Thursby seeks to raise herself up out of the gutter in 1900's New York City, in a precursor to superior soaps like Stella Dallas a decade later. Full of the kind of purple prose common to writers prone to overuse of the thesaurus, and leavened with a bit of humor, the basic story is still entertaining for fans of low-brow lit. - Summary by Matt Pierard