Kate Winthrop is the only child of a shipping magnate, which means her life has already been written: the right marriage, an heir, the perpetuation of the Winthrop name. What Kate actually wants is a camera and women—she’s been keeping both quietly, the way people do when the alternative is catastrophe.
Giuliana Russo came from Sicily alone after her brother died, took work as a maid in the Winthrop house because survival required it. The friendship that forms between them violates every social boundary San Francisco maintains. Class. Nationality. The assumption that certain kinds of women don’t exist in proximity to each other. Kate’s parents see the friendship as a threat because it is one—not to their respectability, but to the entire structure they’ve built to keep their daughter in place.
Kate and Giuliana can’t stop. Neither of them can.
Then the earthquake arrives. April 18, 1906—forty-five seconds and the city becomes something else. Three days of burning. The social architecture that kept both women in their assigned roles collapses under literal collapsing. The constraints dissolve. The hierarchies that mattered become irrelevant because the city is burning and survival is the only logic left.
Jae doesn’t use the disaster as spectacle or backdrop. It’s the thing that forces decisions both women had been postponing. The thing that makes the choice between the life they were supposed to want and the life they actually wanted suddenly real and immediate and impossible to defer anymore.
The historical setting isn’t decoration. It’s the mechanism. The earthquake is what makes the personal become possible.
Details
| ISBN: 9783955336622 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: Romance |
| Subject(s): 20th Century; Genre Fiction; Historical; LGBTQ+ Books; LGBTQ+ Romance; Literature & Fiction; Romance |
| Publication Date: 2016-06-04 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Ylva Verlag e.Kfr. |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 386 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: Jae is a prolific German author of lesbian fiction writing in English, with a Wikipedia entry and a substantial back catalog spanning historical, contemporary, and paranormal romance. She is one of the better-known names in the lesbian fiction market. |
| Book_ID: 106008 |