The Last Queen of the Gypsies

William Cobb's first novel in nine years is a brilliant, quirky, highly readable story as compelling as it is fresh and original. The book interweaves the stories Lester Ray, a 14-year-old boy who was deserted by his mother when he was a baby and has now escaped his abusive alcoholic father, and Minnie, a woman who was abandoned by her Gypsy family of migrant fruit pickers when she was 11--while they journey on parallel quests to find families they never really knew. It ranges from the Great Depression to the new millennium and from the panhandle of Florida, where the novel is basically set, to New York City during World War II, to the Georgia and Carolina coast, to Fort Myers and south Florida. Lester Ray, dimly aware that his mother was probably a Gypsy, runs away from the little town of Piper, Florida, carrying with him a substitute family: Mrs. Mack, an elderly neighborhood woman, and a bizarre 14-year-old girl named Virgin Mary Duck.

He goes where Romany Gypsies lived in the South during the late 20th century--the world of traveling carnivals. Lester Ray finds work with a carnival and meets odd and strange and wonderful people there. Minnie's journey is lonelier, moving from the dry sandy heat of central Florida in 1933, to a brothel in Cedar Key, to New York, to Piper, to the winter camps of the Gypsies near Fort Myers. She is seen first as a girl, then as a woman--a person of immense fortitude and strength, as engaging and unforgettable as Scarlett O'Hara.