The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner

The Nature of Fragile Things
Susan Meissner
April 2024

Four Stars

I enjoyed this period piece, an inside look of life in the early 1900's. Immigrant Sophie finds her new life in America a disaster, and in her desperation agrees to marry a widower in San Francisco. As a mail order bride she begins her new life with a handsome husband Martin and his five year old daughter Kat. Martin runs a thriving business that keeps him away from the lovely family home most of the time. Sophie finds purpose in mothering the little girl, and a respectable and comfortable life. The promblems begin when Martin doesn't seem to want a wife at all. He is secretative and mysterious. When a young pregnant stranger shows up on her doorstep looking for Martin, and the two women compare notes and realize Kat's mother is alive! Within hours the great earthquake of 1906 strikes San Fransisco and the two women and little girl become refugees. The law comes looking for Martin and the depth of his deciet is revealed Sophie realizes she too may be implicated. Her dream of loving and raising Kat becomes her only goal in life. But that future is not only in jeporady by her husband's criminal activity, but realizing Kat must be reunited with her mother. What these three women have endured as victims brings them close together and their bond forms a strong possibility for a future for Kat and for them all.

Book Blurb
April 18, 1906: A massive earthquake rocks San Francisco just before daybreak, igniting a devouring inferno. Lives are lost, lives are shattered, but some rise from the ashes forever changed.

Sophie Whalen is a young Irish immigrant so desperate to get out of a New York tenement that she answers a mail-order bride ad and agrees to marry a man she knows nothing about. San Francisco widower Martin Hocking proves to be as aloof as he is mesmerizingly handsome. Sophie quickly develops deep affection for Kat, Martin's silent five-year-old daughter, but Martin's odd behavior leaves her with the uneasy feeling that something about her newfound situation isn't right.

Then one early-spring evening, a stranger at the door sets in motion a transforming chain of events. Sophie discovers hidden ties to two other women. The first, pretty and pregnant, is standing on her doorstep. The second is hundreds of miles away in the American Southwest, grieving the loss of everything she once loved.

The fates of these three women intertwine on the eve of the devastating earthquake, thrusting them onto a perilous journey that will test their resiliency and resolve and, ultimately, their belief that love can overcome fear.

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