67. The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner

listened on Libby - borrowed from the library

narrated by Alana Kerr Collins

Unabridged audio (10:39)
2021
384 pgs.
Adult Historical Fiction
Finished 6/24/2021
Goodreads rating: 4.29 - 18,653 ratings
My rating: 4.5
Setting: 1906 San Francisco, CA, a tiny town south of SF near San Jose, and Tucson, Arizona

First line/s: "Thank you again for coming.  Could you please state your full name, age, birth date, and the city where you were born, for the record, please?"

My comments:  The story is an unfolding mystery including elements that I love, including mail-order-brides.  It's about how women bod and take care of one another.  Beautifully read, though the Irish accent was very slight.

Goodreads synopsis:  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.
        From the acclaimed author of The Last Year of the War and As Bright as Heaven comes a gripping novel about the bonds of friendship and mother love, and the power of female solidarity.