The last days of dogtown - Anita Diamant

"The Last Days of Dogtown" is a novel set on Cape Ann, Massachusetts in the early 1800s. But this is not so much a historical novel as a novel of the past, of poor people, widows, orphans, spinsters, scoundrels, whores, free Africans, and 'witches': the kind of people who are generally forgotten by history. Based loosely on published accounts of an abandoned rural backwater near the Massachusetts coastline, "The Last Days of Dogtown" reimagines and reinvents the stories of a small group of eccentrics and misfits - reputedly the last residents of the ghost town. "The Last Days of Dogtown" features a cast of unforgettable characters including Black Ruth, an African woman who dresses as a man and works as a stone mason; Mrs. Stanley, an imperious madam, whose grandson, Sammy, comes of age amid the sights and sounds of a wretched rural brothel; and Oliver Younger, who overcomes the most miserable childhood and becomes a loving father. At the center of it all is Judy Rhines, a fiercely independent soul, generous and wise but also heart-broken and lonely, who nevertheless builds a life for herself and a community of friends, in the most unlikely of settings.;As in her first novel, "The Red Tent", author Anita Diamant takes a chapter of our shared past and brings it to vivid life, in this case, changing forever the way we think about (among other things) what it was like to have a toothache in 1815 and the experience of African slaves in New England.