#Readwithsharon - June 2021

It is the spring of 1905, and Sophie Whalen stands at the ferry railing in San Francisco Bay after a long train ride from New York. A photo of a man is clipped to her handbag, and she is looking for him in the crowd. So desperate to leave her past behind, Sophie had answered a mail-order bride ad from someone seeking a wife to be a mother to his young daughter.

Martin Hocking, the man in question, comes forward to greet her alone. He leads her to a carriage for the brief trip to the courthouse, explaining that five-year-old Kat is very shy and chose not to come along. The proper words are exchanged, and she is now Sophie Whalen Hocking. They stop along the way to pick up Kat from her caregiver. The girl stares wordlessly at Sophie and remains silent on the way to their plush estate in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco.

Sophie had fled Ireland in the early 1900s for a new start. She found a menial job and lived in squalor in a New York City tenement, but it was an improvement over what she left behind. Now the wife of a well-to-do businessman (as Martin describes himself), she finds herself in a lovely house with everything she could wish for, including a generous allowance for food and clothing. Due to his travels, Martin seems to have no friends in San Francisco and is away for extended periods of time, so he wants someone to raise Kat.

Sophie, who some might describe as a beautiful young woman, is merely a well-taken-care-of housekeeper and babysitter. She is told never to open the desk drawers in Martin’s office to look for his business records or interfere in his private affairs. Her only acquaintance is a chatty neighbor who knows little about Martin except that she believes Kat’s mother might be dead and mentions the name Belinda.

Then a pregnant woman who introduces herself as Belinda shows up at Sophie’s door during a downpour. She sees the photograph taken at Sophie and Martin’s wedding ceremony, and Kat, who seldom speaks in full sentences, recognizes the visitor and calls her Mommy. Determined to figure out what is going on, the two ladies decide to go through Martin’s papers in his library. They discover yet another wife, Candace, the heiress to a large fortune.

Okay, this may sound a bit like a soap opera, but it transcends the genre through Susan Meissner’s beautifully woven tapestry of historical events. When the devastating earthquake of April 18, 1906, strikes, THE NATURE OF FRAGILE THINGS turns into a nail-biting thriller with all the earmarks of a whopper of a Netflix series. We eventually learn why Sophie was so hasty to leave the Emerald Isle, and the ending does not disappoint.   

Meissner (The Last Year of the War) spins an exceptional story about an Irish immigrant who lands in San Francisco shortly before the 1906 earthquake. After spending two years in New York City, Sophie Whalen, 20, answers a newspaper ad from widower Martin Hocking of San Francisco, who is seeking a wife for him and a mother for his daughter. Sophie falls head over heels for Martin’s five-year-old daughter, Kat, having given up having a child of her own, and looks forward to developing a bond with her new husband. But Sophie learns that all is not as it seems when a pregnant woman named Belinda Bigelow shows up on her doorstep hours before the earthquake, looking for her husband, James, who told Belinda he had business with Martin. Upon seeing a picture of Martin, Belinda recognizes him as James. This leads the two women to go through Martin’s papers, and they deduce he’d married both of them under different names. Unexpected and masterfully crafted twists and turns abound after the earthquake, as a federal marshall questions Sophie about Martin’s disappearance. The plucky and principled Sophie (who is hiding a few secrets of her own) captivates from the first page, while naive Belinda and sensitive Kat are standouts. Ingeniously plotted and perfectly structured, this captivates from beginning to end.