Starting in the year 2010, a 94-year-old lady whom we see has led a spicy and sensual life, leads us back to her years as a young girl through perusing her journals. She starts with the wedding of her grandson who is the gateway to her memories of fine clothes, fancy parties, and a glamorous past. It is the year 1930. Josie Kassemier is a 14-year-old northern Kentucky farm girl. She has won praise and 4-H awards for her favorite activity-sewing. She dreams of designing and creating her unique fashions to become a designer for the stars. The 1930s was the era of bootleggers and gamblers as Prohibition was ending and organized crime was converging in Newport, Kentucky, as the center for dueling mob families. In an almost accidental encounter, Josie meets with a man who keeps the books for one of the restaurants/casinos/whorehouses which proliferate the area. She, who wants to sew for the stars finds herself, instead, involved with the mob. She comes under the protection of one of the longest-term and last remaining Madams in the area. Under her guidance and tutelage, Josie learns what it means to be a successful businesswoman when women could not have their bank accounts or businesses without the support and name of a husband or father. During the years from 1930-1940, we follow Josie as she looks back on her journals and chronicles the journey from a young naïve 14-year-old to her 24-year-old self. The book ends with a somewhat surprising, but not wholly unexpected conclusion, in which she follows her dreams.
"Who we are is sometimes something very different than who we've been. As a 94-year-old Josie enjoys her granddaughter's engagement party, she thinks about what people see, and the secrets she'll likely take to the grave as she recollects her life as a small-town girl learning to make it on her own in the bigger cities of Northern Kentucky. Set in the 1930s, "Hardly a Lady" is part historical fiction, part thriller, and all gripping. Frances Strickler captures the differences between two worlds in the same state - rural Kentucky and the burgeoning Newport - while illustrating Josie's life lessons that sometimes the glitter and glamor of nightclub life has a dark and dirty underside. " Liz Carey,
