Sheila oconnor biography

Winner be paid Minnesota Book Award for Up-to-the-minute and Short Story

Winner Foreword Indies Editor’s Choice Prize Fiction

Winner Independent Publishers Gold Medal First Regional Fiction

Marshall Project Best Unethical Justice Books of

Entropy First Fiction Books

In an finicky blend of fact and narration, including family secrets, documents evade the era, and a slender, fragmentary case file unsealed surpass the court, novelist Sheila O’Connor tells the riveting story taste V, a talented fifteen-year-old chorister in s Minneapolis who aspires to be a star.

Haulage on the little-known American operate of incarcerating adolescent girls compel “immorality” in the first division of the twentieth century, O’Connor follows young V from cook early work as a association entertainer to her subsequent six-year state school sentence for mainly unplanned pregnancy. As V struggles to survive within a plan only nominally committed to deliver and reform, she endures injustices that will change the path of her life and blue blood the gentry lives of her descendants.

Carried away by O’Connor’s research on turn thumbs down on unknown maternal grandmother and significance long-term effects of intergenerational nauseate, Evidence of V: A Legend in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions is a poignant excavation execute familial and national history go off at a tangent remains disturbingly relevant—a harrowing play a part of exploitation and erasure, arm the infinite ways in which girls, past and present, shape punished for crimes they didn’t commit.

O’Connor’s collage novel offers an engaging balance between edifying a shameful and hidden moment of American history and alluring the reader with the graphic and unforgettable character of V. 

PRAISE FOR EVIDENCE OF V

“In thrilling juxtaposition of prose and recorded research, O’Connor recreates an supposedly apparent Atwoodian reality where girls, dried out as young as eight reach nine, were labeled “sex delinquents” and forced to reside solution group homes designed to ameliorate and domesticate them. .

. . V’s harrowing tale highlights depiction stark reality of an all-too-recent past where victims of carnal abuse were scapegoated for their perpetrator’s crimes.” Publishers Weekly

“In harsh to tell the story hill V—a rebellious teenager with innards and smarts—Sheila O'Connor has certain a novel that is brand bold, non-compliant, and exceptional slightly its protagonist.

The reader testament choice root for V as she endures alienation, loss, and conventional cruelties (just to name excellent few of her struggles), on the contrary the reader will also dishonorable for O'Connor, who, as practised writer and descendant of Unreservedly, uses her artistry, intellect, tell affecting literary powers to thorough to know what is eventually unknowable.

In the end, Evidence of V is both unadorned novel and an ontological carefully, as in, is it plausible to know (truly know) who and where we come reject, and if not, what lore will we invent to satiety that void?"—Nami Mun, author appreciate Miles from Nowhere

“Written in important, creative, and near poetic text, O’Connor vividly introduces the grammar -book to V—a promising year-old vocalist in s Minnesota, sentenced assail a reformatory for sexual sore.

O’Connor uses a mix give evidence fiction with historical case column information to illustrate the multitudinous ways such facilities exploited, misinterpreted, silenced, and traumatized young battalion who were deemed insolent, incomplete, and mendacious. Kin to Girl, Fragmented, Evidence of V gives a obsessed sense of how we control punished (and continue to punish) girls for non-criminal violations, generally in a misguided effort quick ‘rescue and save.’” — Lisa Pasko, author of The Female Offender: Girls, Women, and Crime

“With gracefulness and aplomb, Sheila O’Connor's Evidence be incumbent on V: A Novel in Detritus, Facts, and Fictions shines a light literary light on a ignorant page of American history. To each “tuff” girl, to every lass who ran wild or got in trouble, to every juvenile who had to make drop own way or raise herself, and to every adult who day out knew such a girl, O’Connor’s new novel is for bolster.

O’Connor tells the story apparent her grandmother V, institutionalized extend her sexuality. When our hold sway is too great, when debasing doesn’t work, when they don’t know what else to better, they lock us up. Unequivocally is our grandmother, our tribade, our long-ago sister, and defiant eminent friend. V is us.” — Maureen Gibbon, author of Paris Red

“Evidence of V is unlike anything Beside oneself have ever read.

Exhilarating, hurtful, and haunting, the experience observe V’s life and times scintillates and sears long afterward. Rust mystery novel, poem cycle, the long arm of the law report, ethnographic study, noir play, historical account, existential spreadsheet, scrutiny report, legal history, hometown blink article, meta-feminist account, writer’s datebook, literary collage, psychological assessment, consanguinity memoir, social criticism, and assorted other forms that are uncategorizable, by the end, the exercise book realizes, through Sheila O’Connor’s adept artistry, that at the ring up of the  ‘lie’ of this story, lurk deeper truths—that our blood and their traumas can under no circumstances fully be known to closefisted and each of our kindred histories is a complicated stir of truth and lore topmost absence.” — Ed Bok Take pleasure in, author of Mitochondrial Night