The Courtesan's Daughter

<p><em>What happens when a daughter's dream and a mother's sordid past collide?</em></p><p><br></p><p>New York 1910. Seventeen-year-old Sylvie and her French-immigrant mother Justine eke out a living doing piecework in a tenement on the Lower East Side while Sylvie attends school so that she can escape their life of poverty by becoming a teacher.</p><p><br></p><p>At least that's what her mother believes should happen. Sylvie though has a different dream. She wants to be a star in the new moving pictures just like the beautiful Vitagraph Girl. When she meets a dangerously handsome Italian boy at church one Sunday and he encourages her ambitions she begins secretly taking steps toward the career she knows her mother won't approve of.</p><p><br></p><p>But Sylvie isn't the only one with secrets. Justine has kept her sordid past from Sylvie ever since they came to New York fifteen years before stitching together a fabric of lies along with the shirtwaists she finishes every day doing everything in her power to keep the truth from her daughter-that she fled Paris as a courtesan after committing a crime that could still get her arrested or worse.</p><p><br></p><p>When Justine's past catches up with her in a single act of brutality Sylvie witnesses what she thinks is her mother's betrayal and runs away during a freak blizzard putting them both in grave danger.</p><p><br></p><p><em>Ambition survival and unexpected alliances combine in this mother-daughter story that proves love can conquer all-at a price.</em></p>