I really enjoyed reading this historical novel. Set in California during the Depression the story follows Jane as she escapes the migrant camp her family lives in and makes her way as a journalist in San Francisco. I really liked the newspaper background and the characters. The supporting characters who help Jane on her journey are wonderful. The writing is very good and the book was easy to read. Enjoy

A Depression Era tale of a girl who escapes poverty by braining her abusive father with a crowbar and escaping to San Francisco, where she pretends to be a boy to get a job as a newspaper copy boy. As she starts to impress at the paper and grow her role and influence, her Dad reappears on the front page of the paper with his arm around a woman who has just been found badly beaten with a crowbar and who is comatose in hospital.
She decides to turn her hand to being an amateur detective / investigative journalist and quickly starts unearthing sub plots a plenty. There are some interesting ideas in this book, I just felt there were too many of them, with some unnecessary twists and turns that detract from the story rather than being positive additions.

i really enjoyed reading this, it had what i was looking for in a mystery novel and I really felt for Jane. She was a great character and I hope there is more from this series.

Copy Boy is a fascinating historical fiction story set during the dust bowl days in Oklahoma and California.

I found the story entertaining and a quick read. The characters were believable and the storyline intriguing.

Jane is one of those children forced to grow up way too soon. It’s fallen on her shoulders to keep family secrets and she’s desperately trying to hold her family together no matter the cost to her.

After an unfortunate series of events, she is thrust out on her own and makes her way to San Francisco. Jobs are hard to find for everyone, but especially for females. For the first time in her life, having a tall, gangly, boyish figure works to her advantage as she transforms herself into Bennie Hopper, copy boy. She struggles to make it as a journalist and avoid her past catching up with her.

The story has undertones of LGBTQ, feminism, dysfunctional families, and other current topics intertwined with mystery, murder, and suspense.

I feel this book will appeal to a wide range of readers including noir, mystery, thriller, and suspense lovers.

I received an advance copy of the book for review purposes.

I was enthralled from beginning to end! A tale of courage, discovery, suspense, and empowerment - I didn't want to put it down. Jane is a driven young woman who leaves her past and her actions behind for a new life in San Fransisco. Taking on a new persona, and disguising herself as a boy to get work during the depression, Jane proves over and over again that she will not only survive but she will make something of herself. But as her past comes back to haunt her in different ways, can she overcome her fears and figure out what is happening before it is too late.

Certainly not a perfect protagonist, Jane seems real, flawed, and human. She makes choices - some of which may not be ideal, but she does her best given her options. A nuanced story about gender norms, truth, family, responsibilities, survival, and ambition. I really enjoyed it!

I received an advance reading copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are all my own.

Strongly feminist metaphysical historical fiction focusing on a young girl who travels from dusty Texas to San Francisco to develop her own strengths of purpose and to rise beyond the frailties of her family.

This historical fiction focuses on Jane, who heads to Depression-era San Francisco after tragedy. She transforms herself into a boy in order to get a coveted job as a Copy Boy at a newspaper. Unfortunately, her past comes knocking and she has to deal with it. This was a great read!

I could not enjoy this book as much as I wanted to.

I just couldn not get into it.

I will pick up the book someday again and write a proper review.

Copy Boy by Shelley Blanton-Stroud is a book about a young girl, Jane, in Depression era California who dresses as a boy and becomes a copy boy at a newspaper. She wants to be a journalist but knows she has to work her way up and being a boy would be easier.

She left her mother behind, but had left her father for dead in a ditch after hitting him with a crowbar. As she settles into her job, following leads in a case where a young girl was beaten and left in a coma, Jane finds a picture of the girl with a man who looks like her father. She needs to find him before he finds her. She does not know why her father is after her but she has a good idea.

She needs to keep her identity a secret, she has taken her brother's name. She is a twin and her brother died at birth and her mother kept telling Jane that she owes her mother due to the pain and the sacrifice she made for Jane.

This was an interesting story, depicting the Depression era and life of a young girl, in order to make it at a newspaper, decides to dress as a boy. The only way she can be recognized for her talents. I found it a bit slow going at first but I did finally get into the story. It was easy to read except for certain parts but I got past that. I was particularly impressed with the epilogue. I don't want to give away any of the details just to say that it is a fun story!

"This is Raymond Chandler for feminists.” This truly describes it,. It's strong withe great prose and a powerful main character. I haven't read any historical fiction (not any I can remember) set during the depression era. but this was a great depictions of that atmosphere.

"They rode the Okie trail, Route 66...built a canvas-and-cardboard home just off the levee at the confluence of two rivers-the clear American and the muddy Sacramento". The meager abode housed Jane's hope chest of books including self-penned notebooks filled with her detailed account of the family's migration to California in the 1930's. "Momma had always said Jane was gonna 'do' something. Not that she 'was' something, but that she was gonna 'do' something".

Jane owed Momma...she was the first twin born, second twin, Benjamin, was still-born. Benjamin became "a spirit, a stream of particles". "[Jane] hadn't cleared the account though she'd tried in a thousand off-target ways...Though Jane didn't know what she was going to do, she did know why she had to keep trying". She won many contests "...winning all in spite of being a white trash Okie freckled with pollen and tent dirt". Working tirelessly as a tomato picker, Jane knew there would be no payoff in tomatoes.

Momma, a woman "powerful, real and completely herself" confessed to Jane, "Your Daddy don't have...power over me no more...". A fight got out of hand, fists flew. Momma, heavily pregnant, was thrown on the ground. In self defense, Jane hit Daddy with a crowbar. Instructed by Momma, guilt ridden Jane dumped Daddy in an irrigation ditch leaving him for dead. It would appear, to an onlooker, that he was attacked and robbed after playing a gig. Jane was on the run, with seven pennies in her pocket and a hand-printed card-"Sweetie, 3528 Clay Street, San Francisco".

Arriving at Sweetie's dwelling, Jane begged for assistance...after all "...though they weren't blood, they were from the same clay". In order to stay as a lodger in Rivka's home with Sweetie and Rivka, Jane must earn a living. "It is ugly, an unfair world for unskilled women...there is more for unskilled men...'You can do men's work', said the radio voice in Jane's head". Rivka noticed a newspaper ad. "Copy boys wanted for expanding staff of ambitious regional newspaper. Need smart, hardworking hustlers". Six foot tall and skinny, Jane stated,"I could be a boy...It was easier to move and be in the world in overalls than the hose and heels a city girl required". Rivka would school her...hair cut short and pomaded, how to smoke a cigarette and how to speak using a low raspy voice. Meet Jane's new persona. Meet Benny Hopper!

"And because she'd been succeeding so well at faking so hard, she had a good distance to fall. Anything could topple her". Although her reinvention as Benny seemed secure, her "invented identity" was threatened by a documentary photograph depicting a hardscrabble Okie family. The front page photo showed Jane's Daddy with his arm around a teenage girl, a girl who since had been attacked with a crowbar. If this was a current photo, Daddy was still alive and could come after Jane threatening to undo all of her accomplishments. What was Jane to do?

"Copy Boy" by Shelley Blanton-Stroud is an excellent work of historical fiction taking place in Northern California during the Depression. The depiction of Dust Bowl migrants rings true as does the plight of the unskilled worker, especially women. Blanton-Stroud has written a captivating debut novel I highly recommend.

Thank you She Writes Press and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I made it about fourth-fifths the way through this. In the end I was driven away from it for several reasons, not least of which was because the story seemed to drag, and it went frequently off at inexplicable tangents that always made me feel like I'd missed something, somewhere in the text.

It started out a bit confusing and a bit boring frankly, in a chapter that dragged on for twenty pages or so. To me it felt like that part ought to have been told in brief flashbacks or better, in brief flashes of memory of earlier events, triggered by things the main character sees and does in the present. I'd rather that than have had all these pages devoted to it. I'm not a fan of flashbacks at all, nor am I a fan of prologues, and this felt like a too-long prologue.

Despite this disappointment, I decided to press on because the premise of the story appealed to me, but though I stayed with it and it improved to begin with, it went downhill again, and then picked back up, and so on, so for much of the novel it felt like I was riding a reading roller-coaster in terms of how much the novel alternately engaged and bored me. I liked it best then the main character was interacting with "Sweetie" and "Rivka" the two girls Jane, aka Benny, lives with when she first arrives in San Francisco. This part of the story was far too quickly over with for me.

This frequent readjusting from one locale to another was part of the story, but it made it feel a bit disjointed, like it was more than one story about more than one person. Paradoxically, despite this, we got little sense that Jane had moved from the country to a big city. There was no real world-building to speak of, so the action could have taken place anywhere, and Jane adapted so readily to big city life and taking cabs, handling money, and drinking with the boys, and so on, that it felt completely unreal. Everything came far too easily for her.

Jane started out as a strong character, who was interesting and who was someone I wanted to root for, but at other times, and increasingly, she made stupid decisions for no good reason that I could see. She also had a lot of sheer luck in the investigation she was pursuing - far more than was reasonable, which stretched credibility too much for my taste. In the end she became an unpredictable loose cannon doing things which made no sense to me at all, and she quickly lost me as a fan. She came off as really flighty and I lost interest in reading any more about her.

For most of the story she's disguised as a young man and pursuing a career such a young man might pursue, and it seems like too quickly she forgets she's really a girl, so we get very little of her insights into how her life differs now compared with what it was before, and given her impoverished roots and the superficial change of gender on top of that, there were such huge differences between how she had grown up and how she was living now that it didn't make sense she would have so few observations to share about it. There was a major disjunction between the two lives she led, and her serious lack of any real reaction to it felt completely wrong.

Things in her life seemed to fall into place without any real effort on her part, and the story she pursues at the newspaper doesn't always make sense to the reader. At least it didn't to me. I mean, the overall story made sense, but the details of how she put it together seemed completely haphazard to me. It feels like successful leaps are being taken in her investigation without the author sharing much about how she makes those leaps. Either that or I wasn't following the story as well as I ought to have been for one reason or another.

Jane wasn't the only one whose life made little sense though. Both Sweetie and Rivka are two of the other characters who could have been really interesting, but their behavior didn't seem to follow any rational trajectory, and neither does Mac's. He's Jane's too-easy route into the newspaper business. Additionally we seem to have Robert Oppenheimer - the nuclear physicist - introduced into the story for no good reason! How or why that came to be I know not. In the end then, this story had too much and not enough and I could not enjoy it, so I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

Copy Boy by Shelley Blanton-Stroud
This is a dust bowl book. Set in the depression the future of a woman, let alone a penniless, un-educated woman is dim at best. Jane takes her life in her own ends and wrings a future out of it.
This book perplexes me. There parts and revelations that I really enjoyed. In other parts I was not sure if it was a diary of a schizophrenic. A solid point I got from the book is that, in some ways, we all are costuming our way through life. I have no idea if that was the author’s point but it was what I got. Much like my arguing with my college lit prof about interpretation of Robert Frost and the Road Not Taken. I don’t know if I got what Frost wanted me to get and I know I didn’t get what my professor wanted me to get but I got something, my own something.
This is a choppy read and somewhat disjointed but provided some in-depth insight to some of the characters.