Review: ‘Vera’ is a heart-wrenching story of earthquake-ravaged San Francisco | Book Reviews

Vera. Written by Carol Edgarian. Scribner. 336 pages. $27.

In our climate-changing age of catastrophic building collapses, 1,000-year floods, and powerful hurricanes, there’s plenty of fodder for “disaster fiction” shelves. But in the land of shocks and disasters, earthquakes stand – or shake – sporadic. When the earth beneath us rots and disintegrates, without warning and without human provocation, life as we once knew it disintegrates.

So it was for brave young Vera Johnson, the 15-year-old protagonist in Carol Edgarian’s historical novel set in San Francisco in the months before and after the devastating 1906 earthquake.

Vera is captivating from the first page, narrator with a unique voice and enough mystery to keep the reader intrigued. The daughter of Rose, one of the famous and powerful ladies of the seaside town, and the adopted daughter of Moira Johnson, a widow whom Rose pays to raise “so as not to be a prostitute,” Vera a “stupid” possessing all the grit and admiration the term usually invokes. And she’s wise about that.

“If you ever wondered how long it would take for the world to end, I know: forty-five seconds,” she says. “A mysterious stillness that preceded and followed the vibration. It is what we did and did not do in this stillness that defined the rest of our days.”

Vera is the opposite of stillness – resourceful, adventurous, stubborn, charming. A survivor, the book is the tale of how she not only survives and is transported back to the shocking post-earthquake days, when Bay City was engulfed in flames, ruins and losses, but discovers and claims her true identity amid the chaos and destruction. .

As a historical novel, and one that should resonate with Charleston readers given our shared history of the turn of the century earthquake, Vera shines. Edgarian brings to life the many movers and shakers of the political and cultural echelons of San Francisco, with all their rotten depravity. It revolves around a large part of the story about opera star Enrico Caruso’s performance on the night of the earthquake, and is an excellent chip for adding delightful costume descriptions and other anecdotes about the details of period chapters.

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The author does a masterful job of placing the reader in an authentic landscape, a time and era of a young West Coast city coming into its own. Indeed, San Francisco is one of Edgarian’s best painted characters, “a paradise torn with dread, the city of prostitutes and thieves and dreamers and me,” says Vera.

By making Vera a descendant of one of the city’s chief power-brokers, Edgarian gives us a cunning inner/outer person who navigates the realms of the rich, the rude, the poor, and the shameful. After the earthquake, Vera and a tribe of Orphans, including her former Chinese opponents, cemented together and created their own sense of order of turmoil and fairness due to misfortune.

It’s hard to get to know the world as she once knew it, but this allows Vera to get to know and understand herself all over again. She falls in love with Bobby Del Monte, a similarly rude young orphan, and they manage to find and rescue Rose who was about to die from a makeshift hospital.

Although she finds her mother and helps her regain her health, Vera ends up losing her again. For a young girl who wants nothing more than to understand her mother, she learns instead that these are some things that are forever lost, forever out of reach.

“My education was slow to the heart,” Vera says.

Despite the heavy loss and destruction, the reader receives a powerful and uplifting education of the heart. Vera is a story apt for disaster-prone days, showing us that healing, hope, and fortitude make up the true earth beneath us.

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