Best Fiction of the Decade: The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay (2011)

A series of posts on my most unforgettable, must-read books of the past decade.

Image by Tentes from Pixabay

I can’t resist a good end-of-decade list, especially when it involves books. This decade was full of great reads and in this series of posts, I thought I would revisit some of my favorites published during the past 10 years.

If you decide to read The Virgin Cure (and this review is going to try its damnedest to convince you that you absolutely must), make sure you don’t skip the Author’s Note at the end. That’s because Ami McKay’s concluding commentary is just as important — and just as haunting — as her sophomore novel itself.

There she writes that “in 1870, over thirty thousand children lived on the streets of New York City and many more wandered in and out of the cellars and tenements as their families struggled to scrape together enough income to put food on the table.”

Let that sink in a moment.

Thirty thousand children. Living on the streets.