OK teen romance. The heroine Nora is the most aggravating Sunfire heroine since Amanda (Sunfire #1) for sheer unpleasantness of character. Nora's a snob who's ashamed of her poor family and wants to be rich and live on San Francisco's Nob Hill or Pacific Heights. She's even embarrassed at the pungent smells of the corned beef she cooks for her father, thinking it's not refined enough. The poor idiot she's set her sights on to be her husband, Jamie Duffy, isn't properly ambitious to suit her, but instead of seeking out someone else who is, she decides to browbeat him into toiling away on the long ladder from bank teller to bank president. He'd rather fly airplanes and get it on the ground floor of that promising industry. Naturally, Nora thinks this is airy-fairy nonsense. Her snobbery doesn't much let up even after she's tossed around like a rag doll during the 1906 earthquake, because she happens to run into a stranger with a wallet of money and she's compelled to lie to keep up the appearances of her fantasy future. The short format does Nora no favors, making her unpleasantness seem to take up most of the book. I think a character like her would have been better served in the longer Sunfire format or one of those thick epics from the 60s and 70s by Taylor Caldwell. As short teen romance, it's brittle and irritating.

The earthquake scene wasn't all that effective either. Time seemed compressed too much, with the quake and the fire almost happening at the same time. At least it seemed that way. There wasn't nearly the immediacy of terror, and the prolonged suspense, as was in Miner's Sunfire "Jenny," where the Johnstown Flood is truly the centerpiece of the book with great drama and characters in the middle of it.

An OK read, but nothing spectacular.

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