Carnegie's Maid

A good read. Not the typical historical fiction I have read in the past. The maid, Clara, is the personal maid to the mother of Andrew Carnegie. She is the fiction. Andrew is the historical part. The book tells of his rise through the eyes of Clara, who falls in love with him. Andrew, likewise, loves her and because of her intelligence and sensibility, he changes from a man determined to reach the highest rungs of society, to a man who realized the importance of raising up those who have less then he attained. Carnegie was born poor and became a self-made man who himself needed a helping hand. Clara didn't let him forget that and it was she who inspired his philanthropy through the years, especially the free libraries that he established all over the world. In the novel, Andrew's mother casts Clara out of her house and warns her to stay away from Andrew so that's where their story ended. Benedict did a lovely job of flushing out the personalities and it made me wish it were a true story.

I've been dreading writing this review since page 50, when I realized I really did not like this book. But I hung in there hoping for....landmarks, maybe?

Some background, I'm going to Pittsburgh in June and wanted to read something that took place historically in Pittsburgh. I was put off by the cover, but ordered it in anyway. Just note that I love historical fiction, know a bit about Andrew Carnegie, and what I wanted was a sense of what it was like to be alive, in Pittsburgh, at that point in time.

At it's center, this book is an extremely lame romance novel. It tries to touch on too many things: the immigrant experience, Reconstruction, the different levels of the upper elite in the big cities and the idea that investing in the ground floor of a company is smart business. All of these things are introduced, but they are NOT explored and therefore it fails on every subject.
All I learned from this novel was that Pittsburgh was sooty. This novel could have taken place ANYWHERE. Andrew Carnegie is totally without character, cowering to his mother's whims. We meet some of his business partners, briefly, but not Frick? We meet Clara's cousins in Pittsburgh and I thought for sure! We are getting to the strike now! But, nah.
The Homestead strike is briefly mentioned in the epilogue.
Just so disappointing. Also, I started counting the number of times Benedict reports Clara is mending and darning stockings. Answer=way too many.
I'm a little surprised my library has this as a book club darling.