The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey
A true story of sex, crime and the meaning of justice

first things first: I need to thank my mysterious benefactor for sending me this book -- I don't know who you are, but thank you! I've actually changed my mind in going back through the book and upped the star rating. Full post here: [URL not allowed] The Disappearance of Lydia......more

I don’t usually like the use of “might have, possibly, likely, etc.” when reading historical non-fiction but I really enjoyed this. It was well-written and entertaining, and the extensive research the author undertook clearly shone through. I enjoyed the narrative style of focusing different chapter......more

Inside the stories other people told about her, the real Lydia Harvey disappeared again and again. She was no one. Who she was, what she wanted, what happened afterwards: none of this mattered. Written in a narrative style, this non-fiction work so effectively created the sense of time and place in t......more

A throughly well researched book, ostensibly about one teen girl who ended up in prostitution, but also about sex trafficking in the early 1900s and the social attitudes around the sex trade. Lydia was 16 when she was promised a life of silk stockings and beautiful dresses, a pipe dream for a girl s......more

Lydia Harvey disappeared twice: once after she got on a steamship leaving New Zealand in 1910 for Buenos Aires, lured by a pimp into sex work, and again when her story disappeared beneath the waves of history (as most human stories do). Julia Laite engages, then, in a double recovery--finding the tr......more