Will I love Vera?

I have a soft spot for characters who find strength by dint of superhuman effort, and the way this fifteen-year-old takes charge after the 1906 earthquake—haltingly, uncertainly, as is only plausible—makes me wish I’d met her.

Her path is steeper than the San Francisco hills, yet her refusal to ask for pity wins me over. I also admire how Edgarian uses her protagonist’s coming of age to represent San Francisco’s, a parallel delivered with a light touch.

But above all, the novel explores the fraught relation between women and power; and how Vera walks that tightrope makes compelling fiction.

I have read other novels featuring the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco but this one really captures it for me and drops me right into that time and place. Setting becomes an important character to the novel in fact. There is also exquisite use of language (many great lines such as this about death: "The silence when someone is no longer walking this world...") The unique and compelling characters will stay with me. It is a wonderful novel.

The young woman in this story is fifteen on the morning of the quake. She is the illegitimate daughter of a bordello madam who is trying to live a quiet life with the family paid to raise her. The quake causes her two worlds to collide as she collaborates with a former rival to create a new life. Although Vera is young, she’s savvy and determined to care for her younger sister. I loved the glimpse this novel gave into San Francisco’s seamier side, Chinatown, and wild politics as well as the opulent side of Enrico Caruso and Alma Spreckels.

More tumultuous times! This book takes us deep into the roaring corruption of seedy San Francisco as the 1906 earthquake approaches, tears apart neatly balanced lives, and leaves everyone to fashion new modes of being with the scraps. I loved the details of the young woman protagonist making hard choices to keep those she loves close to her, even if she doesn’t understand them, and let go of those she loved, even as she learns from the experience.

Just a beautiful, thrilling adventure rife with diverse characters, historical detail, and larger than life personalities.