Ten Cents a Dance

Christine Fletcher’s Ten Cents a Dance (2008) is a realistic look at desperate conditions, desperate people, and how far a person will go to escape the social class they’re stuck in. It depicts, in as gritty and real a fashion as could be asked for in literature, what it’s like to be a lower class girl in the early 1940s, just before and during the start of America’s involvement in WWII. Showing class relations, race relations, and the strains of poverty and wartime on a family in a clear fashion that
readers will find easy to relate to, this book most certainly deserves to be on the shelves of every classroom and library.