2022/42: Sister Noon -- Karen Joy Fowler

2022/42: Sister Noon -- Karen Joy Fowler

She wanted to imagine the things the ocean hid, fish with bulbous eyes, forests of coral, clams the size of bathtubs. She wanted a moment in which to feel her life for what it was, an inconsequential bit of noise at the edge of something deep and vast. [p. 225]

Set in San Francisco in the 1890s, a city of great wealth and tremendous squalor, of Black and Chinese and European and American, of seances and scandal and charity. Lizzie Hayes, forty-something and unmarried due to a clause in her father's will that promises disinheritance, volunteers at the Ladies' Relief Home for orphans and destitute adults. ( Read more... )