{"id":3618,"date":"2020-04-11T05:05:56","date_gmt":"2020-04-11T12:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=3618"},"modified":"2020-04-11T08:25:55","modified_gmt":"2020-04-11T15:25:55","slug":"mariah-fredericks-death-of-an-american-beauty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/mariah-fredericks-death-of-an-american-beauty\/","title":{"rendered":"Mariah Fredericks: Death of an American Beauty"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I remember when Rhys Bowen started writing her Molly Murphy series.\u00a0 I inhaled them the second they were published.\u00a0 I loved (and still do) the mix of the feisty Molly, her journey of discovery as a new immigrant, the clever mysteries, and the turn of the century settings.\u00a0 Rhys Bowen has the gift of narrative.\u00a0 I am so happy to tell you \u2013 because I want to make you a fellow fan \u2013 that Mariah Fredericks has that very same gift.<\/p>\n

I have so far inhaled all three of her books featuring ladies\u2019 maid Jane Prescott, who works for the wealthy Mrs. Louise Tyler around the 1910\u2019s.\u00a0 She has a way with a story, and a way of getting you to care about and be invested in her characters.\u00a0 In this novel Jane is on \u201cvacation\u201d, so she goes home.\u00a0 Home for Jane is a refuge for fallen women, run by her uncle, a Presbyterian pastor.\u00a0 He takes women who come from the streets and gives them a place to live, something to eat, and a little hope for the future and a different way of earning a living.<\/p>\n

As the women are setting up for the all-female ball they have every year and her uncle prepares to leave for the evening, talk turns to one of the girls, a stubborn one who had fled the boyfriend who attacked her but who still misses him.\u00a0 She is sneaking out and the women fear for her safety \u2013 with good reason.\u00a0 She is found dead the night of the ball.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Jane\u2019s uncle is suspected of the crime and pilloried in the press, sending Jane off on a mission to discover the real killer.\u00a0 The mission involves finding an old resident of the home that gives the reader a look inside the lives of these desperate women.<\/p>\n

Jane also is called back into service.\u00a0 Her employer, the shy Mrs. Tyler (readers will have come to love her in the other novels), has been pressed into portraying Abraham Lincoln in a pageant at one of the biggest department stores in the city.\u00a0 They will also be crowning a new \u201cMiss Rutherford\u201d \u2013 Rutherford\u2019s is the department store \u2013 and along with Louise, Mr. and Mrs. Rutherford are heavily involved in running the pageant from every angle.<\/p>\n

While in other novels Fredericks has touched on social inequality, anarchy, immigration and the rights of women, in this novel, while she touches heartbreakingly on the way African Americans were\/are treated, what she brings to full, breathing life is Rutherford\u2019s Department Store.\u00a0 These kinds of stores no longer exist but they live on in my memory.<\/p>\n

Anyone who grew up in Chicago will have a memory of Marshall Field\u2019s \u2013 and when I was a young woman, I worked at the great Dayton\u2019s in Minneapolis.\u00a0 These stores were practically cities \u2013 they had everything.\u00a0 Field\u2019s had a bakery, a fabric department, a bookstore \u2013 and many of them hosted events, much like the pageant described in the book.\u00a0 When I worked at Dayton\u2019s in the 80\u2019s I was lucky enough to see in the store Lana Turner, Bette Midler, Gloria Vanderbilt and Paloma Picasso, just to name a few.<\/p>\n

Rutherford\u2019s is just the same kind of store, with floors filled with beautiful things, and the salesladies to get you into those things. Jane works her fingers to the bone altering costumes for the pageant performers, and also gets swept away for a night of dancing by a bold piano player. This book breathes life and excitement.\u00a0 The story \u2013 which piles up a few bodies \u2013 is wrenching, and hard to look away from.\u00a0 It\u2019s surrounded by the world of 1913, and I truly felt transported.\u00a0 Very unfortunately I finished this read in a day and now must wait another year for a visit with Jane Prescott.\u00a0 I urge you to make her acquaintance if you haven\u2019t already.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I remember when Rhys Bowen started writing her Molly Murphy series.\u00a0 I inhaled them the second they were published.\u00a0 I loved (and still do) the mix of the feisty Molly, her journey of discovery as a new immigrant, the clever mysteries, and the turn of the century settings.\u00a0 Rhys Bowen has the gift of narrative.\u00a0 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[347,10,99,38,238],"class_list":["post-3618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-death-of-an-american-beauty","tag-historical","tag-jane-prescott","tag-mariah-fredericks","tag-new-york-city"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3618"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3622,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3618\/revisions\/3622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}