The Vestal Virgin Room — C.W. Smith

C.W. Smith's hit novel The Vestal Virgin Room is a tragi-comic love story about a married couple and the agonies and ecstasies of being hitched through thick and thin. Don and Dottie Baxter are a husband-and-wife musical duo (both sing while she's at the piano and he's on drums) who've never made the big-time, but as the novel opens, they're about to get their shot playing the intermissions at a Vegas lounge called The Vestal Virgin Room. They hope their tunes and their comedy routines will lift them out of their ordinary lives �" and away from their sorrows after having lost their only child through a household accident. Sexy and sad, the book tracks their progress during a Christmas season as they play their way from their home in St. Louis to Vegas, stopping along the route as they endure dreadful gigs at hotel-motel cocktail lounges in mid-town America, entertaining regional conventions of drunk hydrologists and John Deere sales people. But their child's death presses on them day by day, and the separate emotional paths each takes to cope with grief bring their conflict to a head when they get their One Big Chance to ooch up a rung on the ladder of fame and fortune. “Smith's affection for these simple people is contagious and wholly believable. That Don and Dottie manage to ride out the turbulence in their marriage and emerge as survivors makes this a lovely and tender book.” Publishers Weekly