During the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl era in the 1920-1930’s, there were a lot of people struggling to make ends meet. It was a time when people were concerned about the country and the political changes they prayed would alleviate their suffering. Of course, history reveals that not everyone endured the financial hardships of the failing economy. In this story, the Amadeo’s were such a family who seemed to “own” Galveston with their lucrative illegal business transactions.

Unfortunately, there were families who struggled to survive, sometimes denying their present situation of loss. Evie Grace Devlin was raised in Vinegar Hill which was as acidic as the name suggests. Evie was raised with a father who made money dancing through vaudeville circuits when circumstances made him close his dance school. Evie holds on to memories of her father who died while she was young and helping him teach dance to students. Her mother was a distant, selfish wannabe actress concerned only in her own welling being.

Evie works hard and finally finds her way out of Vinegar Hill when she receives a charity scholarship to attend a nursing school taught by nuns in Galveston. It’s a dream come true for Evie who becomes instant friends with Sophie Amadeo in nursing school who also wishes to extract herself from her family’s high expectations. Although Evie studies hard and is at the top of her graduating class, she is denied her coveted title as nurse due to her upbringing within the vaudeville community. Embarrassed and needing a job, Evie finds herself being hired to work dance marathons where the dancers needed medical care from lack of sleep and being on their feet for hours on end. For some people this was a way for them to support themselves during these times of poverty as well as an inexpensive form of entertainment.

Evie is content attending to the dancers as a nurse until she is eventually brought in dance. She ends up being paired with Zave who coincidently was trained to dance by Evie's father. She becomes part of the dance duo who would attract crowds to the venue. They prepare for a major dance event at the Starlight Palace on the historic Starlight Pier until tragedy strikes. The story of survival, dedication and resilience dominate the theme. Recommended for historical fiction fans for its unique view of the time era.

Thank you NetGalley and St Martin's Press for sending this book for review
consideration. All opinions are my own. ( )

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

4+ stars
This was filled with a ton of emotion and probably needs some content warnings so I would suggest looking those up. I really got pulled into the stories and loved the growth of (most of) the characters. It was really interesting to read a historical fiction set during the Great Depression as a reminder of how bad things have been in the past - even less than 100 years ago. If you like historical fiction I definitely recommend this! ( )

This is a Depression era story. Evie Grace Devlin desperately wants to be a nurse. Her mother has tried to thwart her at every turn, still upset that Evie has left her and stopped supporting her. Evie moves to Galveston where she meets an. unlikely friend, Sofie.
Evie was a vaudeville star as a child, but when her mother pushed her to do something risque, it soured Evie on dance. Yet, when her dream of being a nurse fails, to make money, she starts dancing in dance marathons. There she meets Zave, a man whom she loves, but believes she let him down.
This story highlights a desperate time in America, prohibition, questionable medical procedures, homosexuality, and how friends can rescue you. when you need them most.
I enjoyed this story. Good historical fiction. ( )

An incredible book that takes us back to the Great Depression, the Hoover years and dance marathons. This is historical fiction at its finest! Hard to put down until you're finished! ( )

Author Sarah Bird says Last Dance on the Starlight Pier was inspired by her mother, who grew up during the Great Depression. One of her fondest memories was of a dance marathon held at the Grange Hall in the little Indiana town in which she grew up, and she made it sound like a wonderful community event. For five cents, audience members could watch dancers moving about the dance floor, even while asleep. But her mother's portrayal of the marathon was diametrically opposed to the "unrelievedly grim" depiction of dance marathons in the classic Hollywood film, "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" starring Jane Fonda. Bird had the strong sense that there was more to the story.

Her research confirmed that the movie did not address the Depression, and Bird believes it is imperative to understand "how desperate and how dire the times were." Vast numbers of Americans were unemployed and had lost their entire savings, dust storms were ravaging the Great Plains, and families could not afford to feed their children so there were scores of young teenagers riding the rails without a home. She learned that the longest dance marathon on record lasted for five-and-a-half months. The contestants were only allowed to lie down and rest in eleven-minute intervals, so successful contestants learned to dance while sound asleep, led around the dance floor by their partner.

Marathons were extremely popular from 1930-34 and employed twenty thousand people across the country, including promoters, floor judges, trainers, nurses, and "sloppers" who fed everyone involved. Contestants were provided as much food as they wanted, which also made them popular because people were hungry. While the dancers were on the floor, they were required to keep moving, so they learned to perform basic hygiene tasks, e.g., shaving, while in motion. It is a chapter in American history that has been largely forgotten, much to Bird's puzzlement.

Bird discovered that a large marathon was held in Galveston, Texas, a city of dark glamour in the 1920's and 1930's. Bootleg sales of liquor continued unimpeded, despite Prohibition, with the infamous Beach Gang running the liquor trade. They imported high quality spirits, including French champagne. During that same period, an entertainment empire was built in Galveston by a local family, which insulated the city from the ravages of the Depression. It was dubbed "the Playground of the Southwest" -- a place where "the Depression was a black-and-white photo in a newspaper of men shivering in a bread line somewhere up north." Bird realized that Galveston would provide the perfect setting for much of Last Dance on the Starlight Pier.

Indeed, the book opens on Sunday, July 3, 1932, at 4:25 a.m. in Galveston and the beautiful Starlight Palace has erupted in flames. The action immediately moves back three years to June 1929 when Evie Grace Devlin is beginning her studies at St. Mary's Hospital School of Nursing. She has won a scholarship and is ecstatic about embarking on a new chapter of her life. No one affiliated with the school knows that twenty-one-year-old Evie hails from Houston's Vinegar Hill and is the daughter of Vaudevillians. Evie has gained admission to the school under false pretenses and must ensure that the nuns who will be her teachers never find out that after her father's early death, when Evie was just five years old, her mother forced her to dance five shows a day, and perform in humiliating and degrading shows in order to bring in money. On her first day at school, Evie meets her classmate, Sofie Amadeo, whose father and uncles are Galveston's most notorious and powerful gangsters, and they become fast friends.

Evie studies diligently and excels, despite the Director's efforts to bully her and force her to quit. Evie is given the worst assignments, but keeps her head down and learns to be an excellent nurse. She is also enlisted by the Amadeos to discretely "splint the mangled finger of card cheats, put casts on the broken legs of deadbeat debtors, and stitch up the pulverized faces of embezzling club managers." But she never mentions those tasks to Sofie. Evie is the school's "token poor Protestant" and in the evenings, she teaches her classmates not only about poverty, but how to dance. In her first-person narrative, Evie says she "was supremely happy. For the first time in my life I loved what I was doing, I had friends, hunger was just a memory to share, . . ." and she believed that no one could take any of it from her. Evie and Sofie plan to room together in a boarding house near the hospital where they will be working. But her happiness is short-lived because on the very day she is to graduate and receive the pin that enables her to launch her nursing career, she is summoned to the Director's office and informed that her deception has been discovered. There will be no pin or career for Evie.

Evie returns to Houston, Vinegar Hill, and her narcissistic, abusive mother, Mamie. But not for long. She visits the Bennett Academy of Dance and her "uncle" Jake, her father's best friend, who offers her a job as a nurse. "Pops Wyatt Promotions" now covers Jake's name on the office sign and the arena is packed. A band is playing and Evie has to make her way through the spectators to see the couples circling the gym with numbers pinned onto the back of their shirts and blouses. "And they were all haggard with exhaustion." Uncle Jake is running a dance marathon and enlists Evie to play the role of nurse. But, of course, she is a trained nurse and cannot simply pretend. Instead, she cares for the dancers, doing whatever she can to help them survive the inhumane conditions . . . and keep dancing.

From that point in the story, Last Dance on the Starlight Pier is an epic adventure about desperate measures in desperate times featuring a disparate group of supporting characters who come together and manage to become a family. It is a story about resilience and love. The dance troupe is comprised of the "horses" (the professionals who travel around the country participating in marathons because they draw crowds), as well as the down-on-their-luck locals who scrape together the entrance fee with dreams of outlasting the other contestants and claiming the much-needed prize money. Amateur, untrained dancers clung to the promise that if they could just keep moving long enough, enduring unimaginable conditions, rules, and unscrupulous judges, they could triumph. Bird compassionately illustrates the point by including several such couples in the book.

Evie is entranced by one of the horses, Zave -- the undisputed star of the marathons. He is as handsome as a movie matinee idol, debonair, and dances beautifully. (Of course, he was taught to dance by Evie's late father.) He expertly manipulates his audiences, convincing the swooning women to throw money on the dance floor during the "silver showers" portion of the marathons. When Zave needs medical attention, Evie is called upon to provide it in order to keep him dancing so the marathon will not have to shut down. Soon, Evie's dancing skills come to light and she becomes his partner. They fall in love and Evie dreams about what a future with Zave might be like. But he insists that he would never be a good husband to her and it isn't until his former partner, Cleo, gives Evie a glimpse of an aspect of Zave's life that he keeps hidden that Evie understands. Undaunted, her insistence upon pursuing a possible solution is misguided and nearly destroys her relationship with Zave.

Bird keeps the action moving at a steady pace as Evie and the other dancers navigate the rigors of the marathons with varying degrees of success. Evie is a sympathetic character -- a young woman who never gives up her dream of one day being a registered nurse working in a hospital, caring for her patients in the ways she could not care for or save her beloved father. She is gutsy, resourceful, and becomes fond and protective of her fellow dancers. She rushes to her grandmother's side when she learns that the older woman is suffering from dust pneumonia, a life-threatening disease caused by inhalation of the dust that blew through the plains, turning day into night and ravaging crops. Readers will cheer for Evie as she refuses to give up on herself or those she cares about, and refuses to be further manipulated and used by the despicable Mamie.

Bird convincingly takes readers along on Evie's journey as she learns about and becomes part of the marathon company, and injects intrigue into the story, as well, as the narrative races toward that July morning and the raging fire in the Starlight Palace. Situated at the end of the Starlight Pier in Galveston, Bird has constructed a clever storyline about graft and corruption centered around the Amadeo family's purported gala reopening of their biggest white elephant.

Bird completed her research and began writing the book during the early days of the pandemic, another dark time in U.S. history. The parallels between the two time periods -- both crises brought about, in significant part, by a failure of competent leadership -- were not lost on Bird, who says the lesson she took away from her mother's stories, her research, and the experience of writing the book during those terrifying and isolating days is that if people can come together during challenging times, there is nothing that can't be accomplished. She demonstrates that lesson through the delightfully eclectic and relatable cast of characters that populate Last Dance on the Starlight Pier. It is an engrossing and illuminating work of historical fiction exploring an overlooked aspect of American history.

Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader's Copy of the book. ( )