"For fifteen years I'd been waiting for a catastrophe greater than my birth. The quake gave it to me." In Carol Edgarian's riveting third novel (following Three Stages of Amazement), Vera narrates the story of the life she carves from the rubble of San Francisco's historic 1906 earthquake.
The San Andreas fault shifted just days after Vera's 15th birthday, but her life had never been stable. Her mother, Rose, the city's most notorious madam, paid a foster mother for Vera's care and scheduled only perfunctory visits. It seemed logical, in the pre-dawn hours after the quake hit, for Vera to flee her crumbled foster home and the approaching fires, and to lead her foster sister to Rose's Pacific Heights home, "five stories and a riot of gables and fancywork." Rose isn't there, but tenacious Vera becomes vital in a network of "fellow scrappers" living in and around "the gold house."
Among a strong-willed cast of real and fictional characters--including the legendary socialite Alma Spreckels and Mayor Eugene Schmitz--Vera forges an alliance with Tan, Rose's housekeeper and formerly Vera's nemesis, who must evade soldiers corralling Chinatown residents. Vera finds Rose in a makeshift hospital and brings her home; women who'd worked in the brothel move in, too, and Vera is soon managing a disparate community of 11. Poverty stalks the homeless camps; crime and graft--sometimes key to survival--are rampant. Edgarian's gritty yet hopeful historical novel doesn't gloss over the countless tragedies rising like the smoke and dust in the 500 devastated city blocks, but Vera personifies the pluck that revived San Francisco, her "temblor-riven paradise." --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.