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Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Author : Susan Meissner
Genre : Fiction
I read several of Susan Meissner’s books.I found this one, The Nature of Fragile Things, to be a fascinating story of women taking care of each other even though they are strangers in the beginning. Sophie Whalen is a young Irish immigrant so desperate to get out of a New York apartment that she answers a mail-order bride ad. Instantly, she finds herself married to handsome Martin Hocking and caring for his five-year old daughter, whose work is strangely secret. On the eve of the San Francisco earthquake that occurred on April 18, 1906, Sophie learns one of the secrets her husband is hiding from her, and eventually unravels others also. In the process, her own story about leaving Ireland comes to light.
I could not abandon her, in labor no less, in a city destroyed. You question why I helped Belinda, stayed with her, searched for her. She was grieving the loss of a man who never existed, an she gave birth to his child all while fleeing fires and destruction just like the rest of us. How could I not help her?”
“When people are thrown into an abyss and together find their way out of it, they are not the same people. They are bound to one another ever after, linked together at the core of who they are because it was together that they escaped a terrible fate.”
Where the title of the book comes from: “The earth can’t help its nature to shift from time to time as it settles itself back into its proper place. The earth did not build the city here, nor pipe it with gas, nor construct its bowels with water mains that couldn’t withstand the natural movement of the planet. People did that. It is the nature of the earth to shift. It is the nature of fragile things to break.”
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