Ratings1
Average rating4
I found a few things to be not as historically accurate but I enjoyed this and will continue the series.
After accidentally reading book two first and not liking it, I decided to spend a little time skim-reading this one before putting it in the donate pile. I ended up spending a bit longer reading because I was fascinated at just how bad it was. If you're wanting to learn more about old Chicago, this mostly is about a trumped-up society and a mystery without real clues.
—They live on Millionaire's Row but the maid is cautioned about the crowds on the street in the two blocks to the grocer and is told to take a “grip car.” Not being familiar with the term “grip car” I looked it up and discovered that they're cable cars like San Francisco's. Indirectly I discovered that they came “near” Michigan Ave, not onto it (which sounded strange to me anyway, that rich folks would allow a cable car down their street) and that she'd have to go well over two blocks to reach the car, not that she could catch one at the doorstep and actually save time.
—Resilient farm girl Rosalind, who was jibed at in book 2 as being “handy if you need coal delivery” can't handle carrying a heavy tea tray...I mean, was she a lady of leisure on the home farm or what?
—Flirting with the son of the house. Apparently these servants and masters haven't ever heard of the “servants ought to be invisible” idea, which is funny.
—Society folks calling each other by their first names
—People speaking with recent terms like “gone missing” (1990s) and “kind of” and so on.
—A woman who is raped tells five people in this book but in book two “only two people know what happened”
—A criminal tells that the reason for crime is “she was going to tell about how many servant girls he slept with” and the criminal murdered her for her resolve? Seriously. I definitely wasn't sold on why this would be considered a threat to their reputation since many young heirs were famously profligate. It wasn't even like there were paternity tests that could prove a man was the father of any potential children.
And there wasn't even a historical note at the end to explain where the ideas for the story came from. This was a cheap upstairs/downstairs story with pasteboard good/bad characters. Hardly even the hint of anything World's Fair like I expected.