Historical Young Adult
Set against the turbulence of 1960s Chicagoβa city in
transformationβand its legendary jazz scene, Last Night at
the Blue Angel is a lush and immensely heartfelt
mother-daughter tale about a talented but troubled singerβs
relationship with her precocious ten-year-old daughter.
It is the early 1960s, and Chicago is teeming with the
tensions of the dayβsegregation, sexual experimentation, the
Cold War and Vietnamβbut it is also home to some of the
countryβs most influential jazz. Naomi Hill, a singer at the
Blue Angel club, has been poised on the brink of stardom for
nearly ten years. But when her big break, the cover of Look
magazine, finally arrives, it carries with it an enormous
personal cost. Sensual and magnetic, Naomi is a fiercely
ambitious yet self-destructive woman whose charms tend to
hurt those around her, and no one knows this better than her
daughter, Sophia.
As the only child of a single mother growing up in an adult
world, Sophia is wise beyond her years, a casualty of her
motherβs desperate struggle for fame and adoration.
Unsettled by her home life, she harbors a terrible fear that
her world could disappear at any moment, and compulsively
maintains a list of everyday objects she might need to
reinvent should nuclear catastrophe strike. Her only
constant is the colorful and unconventional family that
surrounds her and her mother, particularly the photographer,
Jim, who is Sophiaβs best friend, surrogate father, and
protectorβbut Jim is also deeply in love with Naomi.
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