Last Dance on the Starlight Pier
“Welcome to Galveston. Playground of the Southwest,” greets visitors to Galveston Island, Texas, in 1932. Sarah Bird shares the riveting story of Evie Grace Devlin’s life during the Great Depression. Evie, a scholarship student at St. Mary’s Hospital, hopes to bury a dark past in vaudeville and find her calling as a nurse. But when misfortune strikes, she’s swept into the world of dance marathons.
Sarah Bird masterfully develops the characters in this first-person, gut-wrenching account of a young woman struggling to fulfill her lifelong dream. In nursing school, Evie becomes “pinky promise” friends with Sofie Amadeo of the infamous family that “owns” the island, with their illegal booze and gambling racket. The despicable actions of Evie’s mom, Mamie, and the director of St. Mary’s are well-scripted, offensive, and appalling. Devilishly delightful Sister T from the nursing school and later dance partners Cleo and Zave add to the suspense and relief like the fifteen-minute breaks in dance marathons.
Bird’s vivid portrayal of Evie’s life leads readers on an exhausting whirl of dance marathons through West Texas, Chicago, and back to Galveston’s iconic landmarks, the Hollywood Dinner Club, Buccaneer Hotel, Guido’s, and Starlite Palace. “Newsies” keep readers up to date with the Lindbergh kidnapping and the nomination of FDR in the upcoming election. Sensory observations of a bayou, the “oily rag/rotten egg smell of the refineries,” and Bird’s use of shoes —black-and-white spectator wingtips, high-heeled Mary Janes, and white bucks, to symbolize the wealthy in the box seats —are examples of exquisite prose. Bird’s theme of “love that rescues a person” shines like a spotlight on the dance floor. So as the vaudeville saying goes, absotively, possolutely read Last Dance on the Starlight Pier.
