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withbdp's review
4.0
Sylvie was a beautiful character. This historical fiction is a slow burn and is really more about the characters and the history of the times. If you aren't big on american history/labor unions, immigration, race, etc., then this story may not be your cup of tea. It is a coming of age historical fiction so you get to follow the characters through their journey. There is romance, small town/mob mentality themes. I enjoyed the level of detail and the element of journalism and free speech.
lkbolinger's review
emotional
informative
inspiring
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
hendrixpants's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent and Violence
Minor: Sexual harassment
lizal33's review
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
Continuing my reading about organized labor (after Kim Kelly’s Fight Like Hell), this time in a historical fiction narrative about mineworker’s strikes in Colorado in the 1910’s.
kayla_graph21's review
4.0
Great labor union Historical fiction! This book has a lot going on but it keeps you reading. Also I haven't read any other good labor union historical fiction, have you?
cursiveknight's review
adventurous
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
amyboughner's review
3.0
This one took me a long time to read because I stopped for a while. There is a lot of story here, and a lot of foreshadowing. Many times the main character will say something like 'if I had known then...' and it gets to be a bit much.
I would say most of the action happens in the last third of the book, and it all comes at you very quickly.
I would say most of the action happens in the last third of the book, and it all comes at you very quickly.
amysbrittain's review
4.0
3.5 stars for me.
Kate Manning's Gilded Mountain is set in early 1900s Colorado as Sylvie Pelletier leaves her family's mountain cabin to work for the affluent Padgetts, who own the marble-mining company that employs Sylvie's father and many other men in the small town of Moonstone.
Sylvie is quickly shocked by the excesses she sees--and by the sometimes stark disconnect between what the family members say and what they do.
However, she is also captivated by the family's wealth and comfort--and by extension, her own. She feels guilty at her deep fascination with various fancy foods and dress. She also finds herself taken with Jace, the treasured son of the Padgett family, who is himself torn between family duty, secrets, and doing "one right thing," a way of navigating the world that Sylvie has learned from her mother. Yet at the same time she becomes fascinated by George--the rough union organizer who flits in and out of town--and the trouble that seems to follow him.
The Padgetts' abominable treatment of their workers draws the attention of union organizers, a brutally honest newspaper editor, and Sylvie herself. With her own family's livelihood--and the local industry--in the Padgetts' hands, tensions threaten to explode the community.
I was taken with the details of mining-company life and the contrast against the lush life of excess in the Padgett mansion. Sylvie's torn feelings and warring sense of duty and desire for youthful joy and carefree moments felt real and brought me into the story. The tough newspaper owner K.T. was a great character and mentor for Sylvie, and I loved the accounts of reporting and printing on a printing press as well as the conflicts and resilience of reporting contentious occurrences.
Later in the story, events surrounding marble mining and workers' conditions (strike, resistance, destruction, scabs, complicated negotiations, and broken promises) and in Sylvie's life (mixed emotions, attraction, confusion, lies, and secrets) make for jumbled-feeling pacing, and the end of the book involves a significant amount of summary as later events are recounted and as issues such as money, secrets, and retribution are resolved.
I received a prepublication edition of this book courtesy of Scribner and NetGalley.
I love a Western-set story. If you also like stories like this, you might enjoy the books on the Greedy Reading List Six Great Historical Fiction Stories Set in the American West.
To see my full review on The Bossy Bookworm, or to find out about Bossy reviews and Greedy Reading Lists as soon as they're posted, please see Gilded Mountain.
Find hundreds of reviews and lots of roundups of my favorite books on the blog: Bossy Bookworm
Follow me on Instagram! @bossybookwormblog
Or Facebook! The Bossy Bookworm
There in the sharp teeth of the Gilded Mountains, where the snow and murderous cold conspire to ruin a woman, I lost the chance to become a delicate sort of lady.... Instead, I got myself arrested as a radical and acquired a fine vocabulary.... And I'm not sorry, for it was all of my education in those two years, about right and wrong.
Kate Manning's Gilded Mountain is set in early 1900s Colorado as Sylvie Pelletier leaves her family's mountain cabin to work for the affluent Padgetts, who own the marble-mining company that employs Sylvie's father and many other men in the small town of Moonstone.
Sylvie is quickly shocked by the excesses she sees--and by the sometimes stark disconnect between what the family members say and what they do.
However, she is also captivated by the family's wealth and comfort--and by extension, her own. She feels guilty at her deep fascination with various fancy foods and dress. She also finds herself taken with Jace, the treasured son of the Padgett family, who is himself torn between family duty, secrets, and doing "one right thing," a way of navigating the world that Sylvie has learned from her mother. Yet at the same time she becomes fascinated by George--the rough union organizer who flits in and out of town--and the trouble that seems to follow him.
Some lies we tell to make them true, like wishes. All is well. Then there are the lies laid carefully on top of lies, sediment hardening to stone, covering shame and secrets.
The Padgetts' abominable treatment of their workers draws the attention of union organizers, a brutally honest newspaper editor, and Sylvie herself. With her own family's livelihood--and the local industry--in the Padgetts' hands, tensions threaten to explode the community.
Strikes are all the same. Same songs. Same reasons. Same hope and rage. In those years it was struggle and strife all over the mountains.
I was taken with the details of mining-company life and the contrast against the lush life of excess in the Padgett mansion. Sylvie's torn feelings and warring sense of duty and desire for youthful joy and carefree moments felt real and brought me into the story. The tough newspaper owner K.T. was a great character and mentor for Sylvie, and I loved the accounts of reporting and printing on a printing press as well as the conflicts and resilience of reporting contentious occurrences.
Later in the story, events surrounding marble mining and workers' conditions (strike, resistance, destruction, scabs, complicated negotiations, and broken promises) and in Sylvie's life (mixed emotions, attraction, confusion, lies, and secrets) make for jumbled-feeling pacing, and the end of the book involves a significant amount of summary as later events are recounted and as issues such as money, secrets, and retribution are resolved.
I received a prepublication edition of this book courtesy of Scribner and NetGalley.
I love a Western-set story. If you also like stories like this, you might enjoy the books on the Greedy Reading List Six Great Historical Fiction Stories Set in the American West.
To see my full review on The Bossy Bookworm, or to find out about Bossy reviews and Greedy Reading Lists as soon as they're posted, please see Gilded Mountain.
Find hundreds of reviews and lots of roundups of my favorite books on the blog: Bossy Bookworm
Follow me on Instagram! @bossybookwormblog
Or Facebook! The Bossy Bookworm
katiez0314's review
3.0
Another one I was disappointed with. I was drawn to the historical fiction lens of working conditions and unions in the Colorado mountain quarries, and it started off enthralling, but then just got…boring. Could’ve been 100 pages shorter, and lacked energy. Most of the main characters were insufferable and I didn’t really care about any of them.
nferre's review
5.0
Gilded Mountain takes place a couple of hours away from where I live in Colorado. The book is rich with the history of mining towns, and the operations of these towns at the turn of the 20th Century. It goes deep into women’s rights, worker’s conditions and made me think, ‘we’ve come a long way” with so much more to go.
Marble Colorado, where the story takes place is a real mining town, still existent. Sylvia, who was slated to become a Catholic nun, is there with her family as a young girl and sees her father, worked to the bone, her mother and siblings living in squalor, animals mistreated. And on the other hand, she is employed by the wife of the owner of the mine as her secretary and enjoys the lifestyle of relative opulence in which they live. She is pulled in both directions – as someone who would like to fight for social justice and someone who enjoys the comforts of her boss's home. She is also employed in the winter by a female editor of the Moonstone register, a paper that reports the truth. As she begins her job there, she is timid, afraid to speak her mind, "silence is a woman's best garment" was her mother's refrain. and slowly, with the help of different female mentors, she grows up and finds her voice.
Smiling was a disguise of appeasement.
Last year I visited the cemetery in Leadville after attending a talk about the history of the Irish miners living there in the late 19th century. Leadville is the highest city in the United States at 10,158ft. It is cool and breezy in the summer, and snowy and frigid in the winter. There are over 1,000 Irish miners buried in sunken graves, many with no headstone, in the pauper's area at Evergreen Cemetery, and that doesn’t count the endless graves of their wives and babies. They were given tents to live in over the winter. Who could survive? I suspect that Marble was no different, nor were all the other mining towns that abound the mountain towns of Colorado.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he Sid he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator. Mary Harris "Mother" Jones
The book is a work of fiction, with many of the stories based on real events that happened in the mining towns here. What surprised me in the book was the account of the Pinkerton patrols, the fact that in 1908 there was so much vigilante justice, that women were openly treated as second class citizens and that this part of the west was still so wild. A terrific read.
5 stars.
Marble Colorado, where the story takes place is a real mining town, still existent. Sylvia, who was slated to become a Catholic nun, is there with her family as a young girl and sees her father, worked to the bone, her mother and siblings living in squalor, animals mistreated. And on the other hand, she is employed by the wife of the owner of the mine as her secretary and enjoys the lifestyle of relative opulence in which they live. She is pulled in both directions – as someone who would like to fight for social justice and someone who enjoys the comforts of her boss's home. She is also employed in the winter by a female editor of the Moonstone register, a paper that reports the truth. As she begins her job there, she is timid, afraid to speak her mind, "silence is a woman's best garment" was her mother's refrain. and slowly, with the help of different female mentors, she grows up and finds her voice.
Smiling was a disguise of appeasement.
Last year I visited the cemetery in Leadville after attending a talk about the history of the Irish miners living there in the late 19th century. Leadville is the highest city in the United States at 10,158ft. It is cool and breezy in the summer, and snowy and frigid in the winter. There are over 1,000 Irish miners buried in sunken graves, many with no headstone, in the pauper's area at Evergreen Cemetery, and that doesn’t count the endless graves of their wives and babies. They were given tents to live in over the winter. Who could survive? I suspect that Marble was no different, nor were all the other mining towns that abound the mountain towns of Colorado.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he Sid he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator. Mary Harris "Mother" Jones
The book is a work of fiction, with many of the stories based on real events that happened in the mining towns here. What surprised me in the book was the account of the Pinkerton patrols, the fact that in 1908 there was so much vigilante justice, that women were openly treated as second class citizens and that this part of the west was still so wild. A terrific read.
5 stars.