In an ambitious blend of fact and fiction, including family secrets, documents from the era, and a thin, fragmentary case file unsealed by the court, novelist Sheila O'Connor tells the riveting story of V, a talented fifteen-year-old singer in 1930s Minneapolis who aspires to be a star. Drawing on the little-known American practice of incarcerating adolescent girls for "immorality" in the first half of the twentieth century, O'Connor follows young V from her early work as a nightclub entertainer to her subsequent six-year state school sentence for an unplanned pregnancy. As V struggles to survive within a system only nominally committed to rescue and reform, she endures injustices that will change the course of her life and the lives of her descendants. Inspired by O'Connor's research on her unknown maternal grandmother and the long-term effects of intergenerational trauma, Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions is a poignant excavation of familial and...

Where No Gods Came, the 2003 winner of the Michigan Literary Fiction Award for original novel, is a candid portrait of the unlikely faces of good and evil, and how an innocent must learn to recognize them to endure|Winner 2003 Michigan Literary Fiction Award for original novel"Written with precision and perception, this is a highly recommended work from a writer to watch."—-Library Journal"O'Connor . . . remains a consummate artist, true to her vision of a work that is bleak, truthful, and lacking any overt sentimental overtures. Her eye, a poet's eye, misses nothing."—-three candles". . . a touching odyssey of a girl poised between the emotional abyss and the reader's heart."—-Minneapolis Star-Tribune"A sensitive, often disquieting book that rings true throughout. . . . It's the skill of an accomplished writer that we see Faina's extraordinary spirit, while simultaneously...