{"id":28,"date":"2026-01-16T03:56:22","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T03:56:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newstephenddev.wpenginepowered.com\/?page_id=28"},"modified":"2026-02-05T23:59:04","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T23:59:04","slug":"vera","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.stephen-davenport.com\/?page_id=28","title":{"rendered":"VERA – A Novel By Carol Edgarian"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
\n

Forget the history books. If you really want to know what it was like to live \u2013 or die – in San Francisco when the 1906 earthquake hit, put yourself in the hands of master storyteller Carol Edgarian, get a copy of her novel Vera, published in 2021, and start reading.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Right away you will meet the fifteen-year-old Vera who tells the story. She is the illegitimate daughter of Rose, San Francisco\u2019s predominate madame, owner and operator of the city\u2019s predominate brothel, named \u2013 you guessed it- The Rose. Rose, and therefore Vera also, is probably a mix of Persian, Northern African, and Spanish blood, with a suspected dash of Armenian, who, for a fee was brought north from the slums of Mexico City by the 19th century version of a coyote to become eventually the \u201cGrande Dame of the Barbary Coast, the Rose of The Rose.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Vera does not live with Rose, either in the brothel or Rose\u2019s magnificent mansion on Pacific Heights \u2013 to this day unusual territory for people of such bloodlines. Instead, Rose pays a very proper, quite boring widow named Morrie to bring Vera up \u201cto be anything but a hooker.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The foundation on which Edgarian rests Vera\u2019s story is the schizophrenic nature of Vera\u2019s life as she shuttles back and forth between her proper, conventional, relatively colorless environment as Morrie\u2019s adopted daughter and the mysterious technicolor of Rose\u2019s environment where she is befriended and even mothered by the ladies of the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vera\u2019s double life is made more emphatic by Vera\u2019s adopted sister Pie who is as different from her as Rose is from Morrie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We meet Pie, (sweety pie) at age eighteen, three years older than Vera. It is just nine days before the earthquake that will level the city when the two girls walk the family dog on a familiar loop from Morrie\u2019s house on Franklin Street to Fort Mason and back. \u201cPie walked slowly, having just one speed, her hat and parasol canted at a fetching angle. She was eighteen and this was her moment. All of Morrie\u2019s friends said so. \u201cYour daughter Pie has grace in her bones,\u201d they said. And it was true: Pie carried that silk net high above her head, a queen holding aloft her fluttery crown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Now grace was a word Morrie\u2019s friends never hung on me. I walked fast, talked fast, I scowled. I carried the stick of my parasol on my shoulder, with all the delicacy of a miner carrying a shovel. ——- and anyone fool enough to come up behind me risked getting his eye poked. We were sisters by arrangement, not blood, and though Pie was superior in most ways, I was the boss and that\u2019s how we\u2019d go.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s how it does go: it is the feisty Vera who takes the reins, makes the decisions, takes the action necessary for survival when the buildings tumble and the city burns and Pie moons over a lover who jilts her. It would be a spoiler to tell what those actions are and how it all turned out; suffice it to say here that if you want story, this novel is for you, populated with every kind of character, prostitutes, business people, kind motherly neighbors, a corrupt mayor in dire need of an emergency to prolong his career, a multiplicity of races from very level of society, one dog and two horses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And for icing on this spicy cake, Edgarian, like Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment, identifies the specific place, naming the address of where the events take place so that if like me, you live in the Bay Area or have visited San Francisco, you feel like you are right there with Vera all the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, Vera is like a Dickens novel without the boring redundancy and fluffy sentiments. A wonderful read. Bravo!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forget the history books. If you really want to know what it was like to live \u2013 or die – in San Francisco when the 1906 earthquake hit, put yourself in the hands of master storyteller Carol Edgarian, get a copy of her novel Vera, published in 2021, and start reading. Right away you will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/page-full-width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-28","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephen-davenport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephen-davenport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephen-davenport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephen-davenport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephen-davenport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephen-davenport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephen-davenport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}