“This is Raymond Chandler for feminists.” ―Sharma Shields, author of The CassandraJane’s a very brave boy. And a very difficult girl. She’ll become a remarkable woman, an icon of her century, but that’s a long way off. Not my fault, she thinks, dropping a bloody crowbar in the irrigation ditch after Daddy. She steals Momma’s Ford and escapes to Depression-era San Francisco, where she fakes her … Francisco, where she fakes her way into work as a newspaper copy boy.
Everything’s looking up. She’s climbing the ladder at the paper, winning validation, skill, and connections with the artists and thinkers of her day. But then Daddy reappears on the paper’s front page, his arm around a girl who’s just been beaten into a coma one block from Jane’s newspaper―hit in the head with a crowbar.
Jane’s got to find Daddy before he finds her, and before everyone else finds her out. She’s got to protect her invented identity. This is what she thinks she wants. It’s definitely what her dead brother wants.
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You know you’re in the best kind of trouble when listening to an audiobook that requires you to stop. Bookmark. Record a note, and then continue. So many times! Shelley Blanton-Stroud’s Copy Boy, read exquisitely by April Doty is just that book. This may be Blanton-Stroud’s first novel, but she is a seasoned and talented writer, bringing to life the daughter of dust bowl migrants with a history bred in her own bones. The main character, Jane, poses as a boy, with the inner prompting of her lost twin brother. With a burning passion to write truth to power, she goes to work for a newspaper. Her ambition collides with her past in a deft plot, with as powerful a voice as I’ve read in a while. Let Jane speak for herself and for the tour d’ force that Blanton-Stroud has produced in this book. “You think you’re the body, but you’re not. You’re the power inside it. But you get that power from your voice.” Brava!
Copy Boy is the first full novel by author Shelley Blanton-Stroud and it’s a strong one. A period novel set back where many doors are not open women, we follow the journey of a poor girl whose family are share croppers. They live in a tent on the low end of even this community. As the story opens she arrives at her tent to find another man moving her mother and family out. When her dad walks onto the scene, things take a terrible turn with Jane in the eye of the storm. She flees for San Francisco.
Although she finds two women who will at least temporarily let her stay with them, she needs to get a job. After several failed interviews, the idea pops up to try to pass as a teen boy. She’s tall, she’s small chested, a bout with Valley Fever gave her a permanently raspy voice and her upbringing left her rough around the edges. Hair cut short and styled, male clothes on,her transformation is complete. She falls into the new role fairly quickly and lands a job as a newspaper boy, but with big dreams. She has always written in journals, so as a man, perhaps she can become a writer at the paper. But her past comes to haunt her, threatening the fragile new life she is building.
I truly enjoyed reading Copy Boy. The author has a gift for description. I could smell the smells, feel the atmosphere and see the people as I read. During flashbacks to her former life to fill in the story, I experienced the dust and the hopelessness. And the end, when it came, was a surprise.
Copy Boy is a fascinating historical fiction story set during the dust bowl days in Oklahoma and California.
I found the story entertaining and a quick read. The characters were believable and the storyline intriguing.
Jane is one of those children forced to grow up way too soon. It’s fallen on her shoulders to keep family secrets and she’s desperately trying to hold her family together no matter the cost to her.
After an unfortunate series of events, she is thrust out on her own and makes her way to San Francisco. Jobs are hard to find for everyone, but especially for females. For the first time in her life, having a tall, gangly, boyish figure works to her advantage as she transforms herself into Bennie Hopper, copy boy. She struggles to make it as a journalist and avoid her past catching up with her.
The story has undertones of LGBTQ, feminism, dysfunctional families, and other current topics intertwined with mystery, murder, and suspense.
I feel this book will appeal to a wide range of readers including noir, mystery, thriller, and suspense lovers.
I received an advance copy of the book for review purposes.
Scrappy and determined survivor, Jane is the quintessential Okie with one additional trait. She has a massive imagination that can see beyond the limitations the world places upon her and her options. You may not like every decision she makes. [Though does anyone ever consider that issue regarding male detectives from the noir genre?] But you can’t help rooting for her. Findaway Voices provided me a free audio copy, and what a delight to hear this first-person novel read in the authentic accent of my Okie grandmother.
Woven into the plot-rich pages of Copy Boy are two timeless, sexless, ageless questions: What do we do to survive? and Why? Through the author’s cast of hardscrabble characters is a subtext of striving to get ahead, to improve life’s lot. Each of them has their unique driving motivations. Why do we do the things we do? is the lingering takeaway I get from having just finished this coming of age/family drama/crime thriller.
The first chapter, titled “Debt,” is packed with information, and I had to read it twice to get the setup. The effort was well worth it. The opening lines, “You think you’re a body, but you’re not. That’s just the container you collect in,” gave me an immediate pause of appreciation. Knowing ahead of time that this was going to be a depression-era story about a young girl dawning a mannish costume in order to get her foot in the door filled me with spine tingling anticipation. I wanted to know what experiences were going to fill that girl’s “container.” The opening assertion, powerful and declarative, didn’t disappoint. To the end, the story maintained a momentum that had me cringing at Jane/Benny’s struggles and narrow escapes and cheering over the triumphs. The main character may be dressing like a man to fool some, but she’s perceptive, daring, confident, and above all, she’s nobody’s fool.
I haven’t slightest hesitation talking about this book in the same breath as The Grapes of Wrath. Seldom have I read a historical novel that weaves so many timeless tropes so artfully, sketching in sharp relief how the human condition and societal mores haven’t changed all that much over the last century. We can tut-tut over the 1930s ills on which Copy Boy shines its klieg light, but teenage Jane/Benny’s authentically dreadful situation is no bad-old-days-gone-by noir tale; it demands we turn that klieg back on a society that still offers no adequate safety net for abused and/or traumatized children and women, offers few opportunities and doesn’t value undereducated, unskilled workers, leaves doors to upward mobility firmly shut to many. And in a scene particularly piercing in today’s America, newsroom staff debates the difference between truth and fact: a gossip columnist doesn’t “give a sulfur egg for facts! I prefer truth to fact,” while a colleague argues there is no truth without facts, and Jane likens facts to the dirt needed to grow a crop of truth, a comment for which she’s called a nincompoop. The page fairly crackles, and there are many more. “Bashful dogs get no scraps,” Jane avers, summing up what is ultimately a roiling story of survival against stiff odds.
Copy Boy is the debut of the talents from Shelley Blanton Stroud. I thought it was a good read. It has a little bit of a different writing style. The story and plot were unique, as well. It is not one that I not one I would have been able to predict it at all. It was slow at times, but would quickly pick back up and keep my attention. Jane’s story was entertaining. I was not sure what to think of the character at first but halfway through they were able to grow on me. I liked the historical details of the 1930s era. There was some mystery and suspense that I found to be engaging, especially there at the end of the book.
I had the pleasure of listening to the audio of Copy Boy. April Doty’s narration of this version of the book was phenomenal. Her performance was fabulous and did a fantastic job brining this story to life. I would love to hear more books that she has narrated in the past.
I am giving Shelley Blanton Stroud’s Copy Boy three and a half stars. I would be interested in reading more by this author in the future. I recommend it for readers who enjoy early to mid twentieth century American historical fiction with a thrilling twist. It is most definitely not one to miss and worth a read.
I received Copy Boy from the publisher. This review is one hundred percent my own honest opinion.
Shelley Blanton-Stroud’s Copy Boy is a thrilling unique adventure with a bit of humor about gender politics thrown in. Jane, a teenage “Okie” escapes an abusive family situation and moves to San Francisco. Somewhat unexpectedly, Jane finds herself in a high-rent district of the city during the Depression. With a thin, lanky build and a gritty personality not suited for a receptionist job that most women of hter generation wanted, Jane assumes the identity of a boy to apply for a job at the local newspaper. As a copy boy, she is on edge constantly about being “discovered” by those she loves and those she fears. With surprising turns and subplots in almost every chapter, the author takes us into the world of male and female personality and physical mannerisms. “Manhood is something you put on,” Jane observes. Blanton-Stroud’s writing is dynamic and vivid: “He made the air quiver around him like heat waves that distract you from the blisters while you walk.” And in describing the newspaper’s dangerous printing process, she observes of her co-workers: “They wore normalcy like skin, unaware of it.”
Copy Boy is a highly original award-winning novel, one of the best of 2020 that I have read. This is a must-read!
I listened to the audio version of this fascinating, well-researched historical novel. This novel follows Jane, a young woman whose family has left the dust bowl to work the fields in California in the 1930s. She wants to be a journalist, but that job isn’t opened to women. She is desperate to find employment so she dresses up like a boy and lands an entry level position at a newspaper as a copy boy and fools all her co-workers into believing this. Her experiences as she witnesses life from the other gender are eye-opening. Then she stumbles onto a newsworthy situation which challenges her to examine all that she knows and risk everything to get the story.
Suspenseful and full of detail of the newspaper world in San Francisco in the 30s, as well as the lives of farm workers of that time and the effects of the depression in general, this book takes you into a world where gender and economics defined who you could or could not be.
The audio version is narrated using unique voices and accents that differentiate the characters. It does a great job of enhancing the narrative and making it easy to follow when not reading. During the 1st chapter, the audio seemed to go a bit slow, but then I either got used to it or it sped up as I did not notice it after chapter 1.
Jane is a plucky protagonist that we root for from the start. She’s not always likeable but she is resilient and her love for her family and desire to be her true self is the core of this debut novel. The author is a subject matter expert as her family is from the same time and era as Jane’s family. I can hear Gillian Welch and Buck Owens in the background. Highly recommended.
Read All About It: Copy Boy Captivates!
A thoroughly enjoyable historical thriller with a scrappy, “tomato-picking Okie girl” protagonist, determined to make her own way in depression-era San Francisco, even if it means disguising herself as a boy. A copy boy, of course, with aspirations to become a famous reporter in a male-dominated field. Just like Momma, I knew Jane was gonna do something, and it was a fun ride finding out just what that something was. With a cast of characters out of a Dickens novel, Copy Boy has murder, mayhem, and mystery enough to keep any reader awake into the night, unable to put it down. I’ll definitely be recommending this one to all my friends.
This is a story about struggle – about doing whatever you have to do to survive and succeed; keeping your “hands on the plough”, committing to “practice, practice, practice”, sometimes, when you have no other choice, leaving someone in the ditch and moving on. Set in the depression era, every colorful character in this story is filled with grit. I narrated this book and I’ve still got the grit in my teeth.
This is also a story about values – characters come to a fork in the road and have to make a decision about what really matters to them…what are they willing to sacrifice to survive — will Jane sacrifice her father? her brother’s memory? her mother? her people? Could the sacrifice of one life ever be right (or even noble), if it enables another to live; if it enables a whole community of people to be fed? Can you swallow that sacrifice, feel it inside you, and still hold your head high?
It’s about finding and claiming your own voice and feeling the power in that; feeling the strength that comes from looking squarely at yourself in the mirror, at all the dirt and bruises and scars and knowing they are just the inevitable result of riding the white-knuckled ride through life, in the only way you could. The dirt just gets in you.
Finally, when the story has been completely lived, you face the question of whether you can really own it. Can you tell the story — from root to fruit, with nothing in the way, without editing, without changing the picture. Can you?
I can’t recommend this story highly enough – it’s enormously satisfying and I’m jealous of everyone who hasn’t read it/heard it yet. A heartfelt thanks to Shelley Blanton-Stroud for bringing it into the world.
Jane escapes from her abusive father to San Francisco in the 1930’s. To survive, she reinvents herself into Benny Hopper and lands a job as a Copy Boy at the San Francisco Prospect. A story lead she is working on about a young girl beaten into a coma leads her back to her father, who is looking for her.
Blanton-Stroud’s debut novel is fabulous! Starts with a gripping first chapter, we are suddenly hooked into Jane’s life and ruse as she builds up her life taking on her dead twin brother’s identity. The story well researched with rich detail of depression era San Francisco and the life of journalist at that time. Quite a fascinating read I enjoyed.
This is a fantastic debut!
Gutsy California Okie girl breaks into the 1930’s male newspaper world!
Copy Boy is a refreshing and gripping novel about a gutsy and desperately poor Okie California girl who breaks away from her violent and unsupportive family and disguises herself as a boy so she could break into the 1930s SF newspaper world and become ‘somebody.’ I loved reading it! This strong young woman, who makes decisions for survival, not necessarily the ones more privileged women or men would make, is thrilling and fascinating to follow because her choices, and those of the plot, are so unexpected. While guessing how to act like a man, she blows apart gender stereotypes, and is simply herself, free of both extremes. The plot is tight and surprising, and kept me up at night reading. Along with a thrilling story, the book provides a rich glimpse into depression-era California, and has forever etched in my memory the desperation of the Okie camps, the guile of photographers like Dorothy Lange, the chaos and competitiveness of big city newspapers, and the options that a few strong and not so strong women had to choose from in order to survive and thrive. As the daughter of Dust Bowl immigrants, Blanton-Stroud has written a fitting tribute to those women.
In her evocative debut novel, Copy Boy, author Shelley Blanton-Stroud delivers a one-two punch of complex characters wrapped in a story of secrets, lies, betrayal, murder, and ultimately redemption. In a desperate act of survival, teenage Jane flees the poverty of the 1930s Dust Bowl and her dysfunctional family to lead a life in San Francisco passing as a boy. Blanton-Stroud’s beautifully written prose effortlessly portrays Depression Era California, taking the reader on a journey filled with twists and unexpected turns. Part coming-of-age story, part mystery, Copy Boy is sure to please readers of historical fiction.
Copy Boy by Shelley Blanton-Stroud is a book about a young girl, Jane, in Depression era California who dresses as a boy and becomes a copy boy at a newspaper. She wants to be a journalist but knows she has to work her way up and being a boy would be easier.
She left her mother behind, but had left her father for dead in a ditch after hitting him with a crowbar. As she settles into her job, following leads in a case where a young girl was beaten and left in a coma, Jane finds a picture of the girl with a man who looks like her father. She needs to find him before he finds her. She does not know why her father is after her but she has a good idea.
She needs to keep her identity a secret, she has taken her brother’s name. She is a twin and her brother died at birth and her mother kept telling Jane that she owes her mother due to the pain and the sacrifice she made for Jane.
This was an interesting story, depicting the Depression-era and life of a young girl, in order to make it at a newspaper, decides to dress as a boy. The only way she can be recognized for her talents. I found it a bit slow going at first but I did finally get into the story. It was easy to read except for certain parts but I got past that. I was particularly impressed with the epilogue. I don’t want to give away any of the details just to say that it is a fun story!