If you’re in the mood for a quick, cozy, elegantly crafted story, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl, by P.A. Cornell, may be right up your alley. It’s highly stylized, so this novelette certainly won’t be to everybody’s taste, and the speculative elements could be removed without altering the retro-futuristic near-noir romance plot much, but it also has a great deal of charm. It also has a female protagonist you can cheer for, a smart one, who knows what she wants and takes action to get it.
Additionally, it has a male co-protagonist who is, unfortunately, a sap. He’s a fool for love, but also foolish in other ways, not only trusting the wrong people but taking terrible risks with his own partner’s trust. After I lost most of my patience with him, fortunately, the book focused almost entirely on her.
One of the unusual stylistic choices in this third-person omniscient narrative is that nobody has a name. The titular Shoeshine Boy and Cigarette Girl are the co-protagonists, and The Man (an individual, not The Authorities) drives a lot of the action. There are also various Marks, and people who don’t even get capital letters (a cop, a hovercab driver, etc.). As may be expected, tropes are nearly ubiquitously involved here, and Shoeshine Boy is almost cringingly predictable.
Cigarette Girl, however, refuses to live within people’s expectations. She is much more than the beautiful, busty, blue-eyed blonde whose surface most people stop looking beyond. As a sometime pickpocket, she’s very observant and something of a psychologist, and she immediately picks up on clues that The Man is not to be trusted. When she realizes that The Man has picked out her partner as a Mark, she takes immediate and effective steps to turn the tables.
In some ways, Shoeshine Boy may not seem like a worthy partner for Cigarette Girl. It seems as though he puts more actual thought into his cobbling (his dream is to create his own shoe line) than their relationship, although that’s because he expects the best from people and doesn’t see through their lies. (I was reminded of the glorious shoes seen early in The Riddle of the Sands (1979), when Michael York shows up clad and shod for what he expects to be a luxury cruise.)
However, he adores her, and his kisses make her knees go weak; moreover, he makes her want to become a better person, to live up to his image of her. Most of all, he is her choice, and anyone who tries to get in their way had better look out!
This is a story that may come off as a little bit twee for some readers, and you definitely need to be in the right mood to appreciate it. But the 1950s-style spacefaring society is fun to visit, in its retro way, with airship docks on the towers of alt-Toronto and regular flights to the Moon. I called this novelette near-noir in my introduction, but in fact, it has a pretty happy ending. Most modern readers will appreciate that Cigarette Girl herself doesn’t indulge, and is breaking her boyfriend of the habit. Additionally, I love the cover art by Kim Herbst, and the Interior illustrations by Ahmed Raafat, which really enhance the setting and feeling of the story. Finally, I appreciated the author’s afterword, where Cornell put some of her choices into context.
Shoeshine Boy and Cigarette Girl, by P.A. Cornell, can be ordered here.
Content warnings: Sexism, attempted exploitation, and intended nefariousness in the plot; mild violence; reference to past crimes; betrayal.
Disclaimer: I received a free ebook for review from the publisher.
