Long and Short Reviews welcomes Laura McBride who is celebrating the release of her newest book In the Midnight Room.
I was sitting in a dilapidated Las Vegas showroom – on a wobbly chair with a ripped seat – when the character June Dibb popped into my head. I had come to that showroom reluctantly, ferrying an out-of-town guest who had read that the lead singer of The Platters was performing there.
It was the height of the recession and Las Vegas had been hit hard. The casino we were in was supposed to have been imploded more than a year earlier. The money to implode it ran out, so the casino just stayed there, untended, unloved, growing smokier and dirtier and more dilapidated by the day. I had little hope of enjoying myself.
But enjoy myself I did.
Because it was the lead singer of The Platters, and a couple of his friends who had sung with The Coasters, and those guys – no young chickens – could really sing and dance. They had been performing for decades, and they knew how to turn that terrible room into a night to remember. Live entertainment is one of the best things about living in Las Vegas, and in the middle of that show, I started to wonder about all the people and all the entertainers and all the nights that little showroom had seen.
And just like that, June Dibb popped in.
Daring, fun-loving, a little dangerous. A young woman who came to Nevada in the 50’s for a quickie divorce and ended up owning one of the hottest casinos in Las Vegas. She arrived in my mind fully formed, and the next morning, I set aside a half-finished novel and started writing In the Midnight Room.
At first, I thought the whole book would be about June. About June and her husband and the singer they hired to make them all a lot of money. About June and her secrets and the tensions created by a fiercely segregated town that got rich off its African American performers.
That is how the book begins, but in the quest to follow June’s life – from bold young flirt to seasoned casino executive to anonymous old woman – other characters bloomed. A Filipino mail-order bride who wins a jackpot in June’s casino. A school teacher whose birth is shrouded in mystery. An immigrant mother working as a maid in June’s hotel.
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Mostly, I wrote In the Midnight Room to please a reader. To drop that reader into an imagined world that would feel real. To create characters that a reader would not want to give up, to put those characters in situations that a reader would not predict, and to keep that reader turning the pages – anxious and engaged and hopeful – straight on through the night.
From the author of the acclaimed novel We Are Called to Rise comes a “jewel of a novel” (BookPage) about four vivid and complicated women in Las Vegas whose lives become connected by secrets, courage, tragedies, and small acts of kindness.
Fun-loving and rebellious, twenty-one-year-old June Stein abandons the safe world of her New Jersey childhood for edgy 1950s Las Vegas. For the next 60 years, June will dare to live boldly. She will upend conventions, risk her heart and her life, rear a child, lose a child, love more than one man, and stand up for more than one woman.
June’s story will intertwine with those of three unlikely strangers: a one-time mail order bride from the Philippines, a high school music teacher, and a young mother from Mexico working as a hotel maid. Knit together around June’s explosive secret, they forge a future that none of them foresee.
This jubilant, compassionate novel explores the unexpected ways that life connects us, changes us, and even perfects us. A powerful story of lust and of hope, of redemption and of compassion, In the Midnight Room is a smart, sagacious novel about womanhood, family bonds, and how we live in America now.
About the Author: 
Laura McBride lives in Las Vegas and teaches composition at the College of Southern Nevada. She is the author of the novels We Are Called to Rise and In the Midnight Room.
Buy the book at Amazon.
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