Review
In an interview about her new book,
Out of the Easy, Ruta Sepetys describes an object that sent her on a wild and wonderful chase. She received a pair of vintage opera glasses as a birthday present. Still in its original case, the glasses were bought from a New Orleans jeweler, and engraved with the words
from her friend Willie Robert. Sepetys is madly in love with history (her brilliant debut novel,
Between Shades of Gray, is a very intimate look at a 15-year-old Lithuanian girl's experiences in one of Stalin's labor camps) and so she hired a researcher to try to find more information about the glasses. Willie, it turns out, was a brothel owner from the French Quarter in New Orleans. Sepetys even learned that the jeweler who sold the glasses ended up poisoned to death after eating a dozen oysters in the Quarter. As Sepetys says in the interview, "My fascination...
Beyond the Book
In an interview about her new book,
Out of the Easy, Ruta Sepetys describes finding a different book, one that blew her away. She was out in the rain once and had ducked into a bookstore to keep from getting wet, when she saw the book
The Last Madam: Life in the New Orleans Underworld by Christine Wiltz. She bought and read the book in one sitting. "The Last Madam" was Norma Wallace, a powerful madam who ran a brothel in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Sepetys was mesmerized. Years later, she was able to go to Wiltz's house, spend the day with her, and learn all about the New Orleans underworld that was home to Norma Wallace. She said she couldn't have written
Out of the Easy without this book or Wiltz. Willie Woodley, the madam who runs the brothel in Sepetys'...
