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In an ambitious blend of fact and fiction, novelist Sheila O’Connor tells the riveting story of V, a fifteen-year-old singer in 1930s Minneapolis. Drawing on the American practice of incarcerating adolescent girls for “immorality” in the first half of the twentieth century, O’Connor follows V from her work as a nightclub entertainer to her subsequent six-year state school sentence for an unplanned pregnancy. Inspired by O’Connor’s research on her unknown maternal grandmother and the long-term effects of intergenerational trauma, Evidence of V is a poignant excavation of familial and national history that remains disturbingly relevant—a harrowing story of exploitation and erasure, and the infinite ways in which girls are punished for crimes they didn’t commit.