Rating: WORTHY!
Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This was an amazing story about Elizabeth. Or is it LittleBeth? No, I think it’s just Beth. Anyway, she’s troublesome and then some, and she gets sent off to her maiden Aunt in San Francisco to become “refined”. She resents this with all her eleven-year old might, but she’s resigned to it. That is, she’s resigned to going. She’s not about to become refined if she can help it. There’s only one problem: this is San Francisco in mid-April 1906 and a couple of days away is a massive earthquake in which some three thousand people will die and eighty percent of this city of nearly half a million people will be destroyed. Severe damage and death also occurred outside of the SF metro area, too. The path of the Salinas River into the Pacific was diverted by six miles!
I had a hard time getting into this for a couple of chapters, but then it was like something clicked and I was completely on board. I don’t know what my problem was with the beginning. Maybe it’s my allergic reaction to first person PoV novels. I normally cannot stand them, and I can understand even less why authors are so OCD over them. I try to avoid them like the plague, but since none of these novels (except my own just published!) actually carry a mental health warning sticker on the cover, it’s hard to know what voice the novel is in until you request it and get to reading it.
This one, as it happens, turned out to be readable and the protagonist didn’t feel to me like she was self-obsessed or arrogantly demanding we look at her all the time. She has a way of deflecting attention from herself to what’s going on around her, and this was why, I think, the novel really opened up as it progressed to the train, and thereby to ‘Frisco.
The author made me feel like I was going through this with Beth: struggling to understand what was happening that morning as the world came literally crashing down around her. I felt what she felt, and I saw the eyesore. I felt the heat from the appalling, raging fires, and I smelled the smells. I felt her fear of losing her aunt even as she had such a prickly relationship with her. The writing is remarkable; it’s smart enough for an adult to appreciate, but juvenile enough for a kid Beth’s age to read, and to enjoy and engage with.
If I had a complaint it would be the usual one I have with children’s historical novels (and not a few adult ones for that matter, particularly time-travel ones) which is that of coopting historical figures and having them take part in the story. In this case it was Enrico Caruso - who was actually in SF when the quake hit. He left quickly and swore he would never return, and he never did. The story would have been perfectly fine had he not been in it, or had he merely been in it for the performance, and not actually hanging out with the girl after the quake, so I never did get the point of including him. He’s not the kind of person an eleven year old is likely to be interested in, or relate to.
But that’s a minor irritation, and it didn’t spoil the story overall, which was excellent. It was charming, funny, and sad. Beth was an awesome character, and I recommend her story highly.
