Following the success of Gold Digger (2019), Rebecca Rosenberg delivers a sparkling and fiercely tragic biofic of Baby Doe’s daughter, the dazzling Silver Dollar Tabor.

This is really the tale of both Baby Doe and her daughter, anchored around a 1932 frame story in which Baby Doe tries desperately to save her husband’s legacy, a failing silver mine in Leadville, Colorado, while working with Silver’s old friend, Carl Erickson, to write his movie about the Tabors. Flashback chapters reveal all that Baby Doe doesn’t know about her daughter’s difficult life.

Silver, a dramatic and fervently ambitious 20-something, aims to become a performer, but when attacked by a family friend, Silver develops an alternate personality, Echo, who comes to her defense. Fleeing 1919 Denver for the Midwest, Silver lands in Chicago and tries various acts, but her brief moments of success are undercut by a downward spiral of pain and loss. Her biggest obstacle becomes Echo, a more brutal, brittle, and reckless personality that Silver can’t explain to her loved ones.

Rosenberg’s prose is as sharp as small daggers, and her images leap off the page, especially when describing some of Silver’s more flamboyant acts, like her tiger taming. The gangster underworld of Prohibition-era Chicago feels familiar by now, but Rosenberg adds in the temperance and white supremacist movements for extra conflict.

Scenes whirl along to dizzying effect, sometimes without a sense of character development or dramatic arc, and the Silver/Echo scenes fall into a predictable pattern: a wildly overconfident flare of hope instantly blotted by despair and defeat, while Baby Doe only has one register: grimly resolute. The hopeful ending strikes a discordant note considering the tragic real-life endings for Silver, Baby Doe, and Carl.

But if the narrative’s hectic pacing, fragmented scenes, and amnesiac gaps are occasionally disorienting, they are also thrilling. Readers will hang on as desperately as Silver doing her Slide for Life act to see how her story unfolds.

Also available in hardcover.