Taking Care of Cleo: A Novel

ISBN: 1590512138

Title: Taking Care of Cleo: A Novel

Author: Bill Broder

KDL Description:

Longing to escape the perpetual responsibility of caring for her autistic older sister, eighteen-year-old Rebecca, a member of her Prohibition-era Detroit lakeshore community’s only Jewish family, discovers a bootleggers’ yacht filled with illegal liquor that she attempts to sell to pay her way through college.

Amazon Description:

A rich and suspenseful novel about two enterprising young women who unwittingly run afoul of the notorious Jewish Purple Gang in Prohibition-era Detroit.

The year is 1928, the height of Prohibition; the setting is a resort town on the shores of Lake Michigan. The Bearwalds are the only Jewish family in town, owners of the local dry goods store. Cleo, the elder daughter, is a beautiful, autistic twenty-year-old who, in her own way, operates more successfully than her loved ones. Rebecca, eighteen, yearns to escape what looks to be a lifetime of “taking care of Cleo” — the only role her parents see for her. Cleo herself has other ideas.

The novel’s intricate plot is set in motion when Cleo discovers a beached bootleggers’ yacht filled with illegal liquor. Using materials and tools from the boatworks where she is an apprentice boatwright, she renovates the yacht and coerces her sister into helping her to sell the liquor so that Rebecca, who is unaware of the plan, will have money to attend the University of Michigan. Cleo’s activities cause the Purple Gang, famous Jewish gangsters out of Detroit, to mistake her father for a rival bootlegger, with near-fatal results.

Running through Taking Care of Cleo is a subtle and life-affirming reevaluation of autism, which becomes one bright thread in a novel that is by turns serious, ironic, and comic, and ends with a happy surprise.