A Race to Splendor
A Harvard graduate in history, she has written numerous fiction and non-fiction books, including the award-winning Island of the Swans. She and her husband of three decades live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Set primarily just after the San Francisco earthquake, this epic novel is equal parts romance, architecture, and intrigue, with a dash of twenty-first-century feminism. Newly minted architect Amelia returns to San Francisco from Paris to find that her alcoholic father has gambled away the hotel her grandfather left her. She instantly hates the arrogant buyer of the hotel, but as any reader of romance novels knows, that won't last long.
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Thrown together by the earthquake and their shared love of the hotel, will the two be able to overcome their differences? Adding to the romance is the threat of a corrupt city government. Although the romantic and dramatic plotlines are enjoyable, the real meat of the story comes in the meticulously researched detail. As in a lot of historical fiction, modern sensibilities intrude from time to time, which has the unfortunate result of creating some conversations that sound more like position papers than actual dialogue.
Overall, though, Ware re-creates the engrossing world of San Francisco at the turn of the last century. For her sixth novel after A Light on the Veranda , Ware returns to historicals with an unlikely romance framed around San Francisco's devastating earthquake of New architect Amelia Bradshaw returns to the city to claim what's left of the Bay View, her grandfather's hotel next to Chinatown, only to find that her drunkard father has lost it to J.
Thayer in a poker game. After an unsuccessful court battle-at a time when women had no right of possession-Bradshaw takes a job as junior architect under Julia Morgan, the first licensed female architect in California history. When Morgan's firm is selected to rebuild the Bay View, along with its competitor, the Fairmont, Bradshaw is put in charge of the former, forcing her to work closely with Mr.
A Race To Splendor by Ciji Ware
Thayer, her adversary, who is determined to beat the anniversary of the quake and the opening of the Fairmont. In time, Bradshaw and Thayer learn that they have more in common than they think, and Bradshaw grows close to some of the Chinese workers, giving Ware a chance to chronicle the despair faced by that community during the disaster. Ware's trailblazing woman is a feisty host for an affecting story of the struggle to rise above the wreckage of mankind. Amelia Bradshaw's return to San Francisco after earning a degree in architecture should have been cause for celebration.
A Race to Splendor
But her family hotel has been gambled away to J. Thayer by her sot of a father, and the law in the form of corrupt judges does not support her.
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Worse, school friend and mentor Julia Morgan is unable to make good on her offer of a position for Amelia. In an instant, an earthquake reduces Amelia's problems, along with much of the city, to rubble, and the aftermath brings changes she could never have foreseen. Drawn into the frenzy to rebuild San Francisco, Amelia is also drawn to J. From her gripping descriptions of the earthquake and its aftermath to the interplay between the protagonists, this is another winner from an excellent wordsmith.
While Amelia is given the job of overseeing the rebuilding of the Bay View, tensions begin to mount between her and J. Thayer who wants more than a professional relationship. The construction work in the city is beset with corruption problems and J. As Amelia spends more time with J. I found A Race To Splendor to be something of a mixed bag, while I loved the historical backdrop centring on the earthquake and the aftermath, the romance elements were more problematic and very stereotyped.
There were a lot of plot points and loose ends tied up in the last few that could have been tied up sooner. Following the recent ruination of Japan by one of the worst earthquakes on record, and the subsequent wrath of the deadly tsunami, this historical fiction novel is an almost surreal reminder of our own frailty. Reflexively, Amelia cast her right arm in front of her face, but not before blood spurted from her scalp and ran down her chee. I enjoyed learning about the period, and Ware does a great job in educating her readers without the writing having a textbook flavor. But will it survive the continued suspicions and secrets they each hold? Based on meticulous research, A Race to Splendortells the story of the audacious people of one of the world's great cities rebuilding and reinventing themselves after immense human tragedy.
While I appreciated Amelia was a strong woman who knew her own mind, I felt her values were a little too modern, particularly in regard to her sexual encounters. Amelia has just ended a longterm affair with a man who wanted her to give up any thoughts of having a career so they could marry. Considering Amelia was living openly with this man in Paris, I found her attitude towards J. The plot relies a little too heavily on misunderstandings which could be easily resolved if the characters ever bothered to talk to each other properly.
While it makes for great drama, it is overdone to the extent it becomes more annoying than anything else.