Gordon Hall came to the US from England, became a biographer, then inherited a fortune from an old lady he’d befriended that allowed him to make a new start in Charleston SC. There, he became Dawn Langley Hall, supposedly raised by Vita Sackville-West. She said the surgery was to correct a defect rather than a sex change. She married a blue-collar black man, which didn’t go down well with the Charleston folks, then announced she was pregnant and gave birth to a baby. Did she?

This is both the story of an amazing person and an attempt to track down the truth (without malice) about the birth and her life. Edward Ball is a Southerner who wrote the excellent Slaves in the Family so he's a good person to describe the nuances of this odd story. ( )

I really liked Edward Ball's other two books, Slaves in the Family and The Sweet Hell Inside, but this one falls into the just okay category.

Gordon/Dawn is an interesting enough character, but ultimately not very likeable. S/he is in most ways a cipher and remains a cipher throughout the book - missing from the story, in a very real sense. This is much less a book about his/her life and much more a book about the author trying to figure out the true gender of his subject. Was Gordon/Dawn intersexed? Klinefelter's? Congenital adrenal hyperplasia? Much of the book is spent in speculation on the true state of Gordon/Dawn's genitalia before surgery and this is probably the least interesting thing about him/her. More interesting was his/her ability to develop and maintain relationships with people who were useful and ability to live a role without ever revealing him or herself. The book explores some of this, but not enough of it.

Also missing is an exploration of the society s/he so offended. In his previous books Ball does a great job of providing social history and the cultural context of locale. With several rich opportunities to explicate this element (Sissinghurst, Greenwich Village, Charleston), Ball sadly neglects it. This book needed to be fleshed out and enriched, perhaps in much the same way Gordon/Dawn did. ( )

Horribly investigated and written. Looking for rumors and didn't find any evidence -- why write this book? ( )

boring ( )

The author doesn't create the most streamlined story and jumps around a bit, causing a little bit of a jumble puzzle in the process and one is left with a lot of unanswered questions at the end of the day. Regardless of that, it is a bizarre tale that keeps you turning the pages, even if the author may not have done it the justice it deserved. ( )