Gilded Mountain: A Novel

by Kate Manning Narrated by Dawn Harvey

Overview

“Immersive...awe-inspiring.” -The New York Times “An epic story of love, hope, and perseverance.” - #1 New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline

This “stellar read” (Los Angeles Times) is an exhilarating tale of an unforgettable young woman who bravely exposes the corruption that enriched her father's employers in early 1900s Colorado.

In a voice infused with sly humor, Sylvie Pelletier recounts leaving her family's snowbound mountain cabin to work in a manor house for the Padgetts, owners of the marble-mining company that employs her father and dominates the town. Sharp-eyed Sylvie is awed by the luxury around her; fascinated by her employer, the charming “Countess” Inge, and confused by the erratic affections of Jasper, the bookish heir to the family fortune. Her fairy-tale ideas take a dark turn when she realizes the Padgetts' lofty philosophical talk is at odds with the unfair labor practices that have enriched them. Their servants, the Gradys, formerly enslaved people, have long known this to be true and are making plans to form a utopian community on the Colorado prairie.

Outside the manor walls, the town of Moonstone is roiling with discontent. A handsome union organizer, along with labor leader Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, is stirring up the quarry workers. The editor of the local newspaper-a bold woman who takes Sylvie on as an apprentice-is publishing unflattering accounts of the Padgett Company. Sylvie navigates vastly different worlds and struggles to find her way amid conflicting loyalties. When the harsh winter brings tragedy, Sylvie decides to act.

Drawn from true stories of Colorado history, Gilded Mountain is a tale of a bygone American West seized by robber barons and settled by immigrants, and is a story imbued with longing-for self-expression and equality, freedom and adventure.

Editorial Reviews

JANUARY 2023 - AudioFile

Narrator Dawn Harvey delivers this tale of labor and love, which takes place in a Colorado mining community from 1907 to 1909. Québecois American Sylvie Pelletier’s union-minded father toils in the marble mines of Moonstone. Despite her natural sympathies for the miners, Sylvie’s attracted to the mine owner’s charismatic son—and the tempting opulence of his life, so different from the rigors of her own. The African American servants who work for his family add a complicating counterpoint to the conflict. Sylvie narrates the events from decades later, and Harvey deftly balances distance with immediacy. She is distinctly less successful with her accents. Listeners familiar with the sounds of French and French-accented English may find themselves wincing frequently, and many of the secondary characterizations tip into caricature. A mixed bag. V.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/05/2022

Manning (My Notorious Life) sets this stellar coming-of-age novel in early 20th-century Moonstone, Colo., where a young woman gets a firsthand look at the machinations behind an exploitive mining company and its workers’ efforts to unionize. Sixteen-year-old Sylvie Pelletier’s quarryman father, Jacques, works in the dangerous high-altitude marble mines owned by industrialist Jerome Padgett. Jacques and union representative George Lonahan want to organize the miners, efforts the company fights with various forms of intimidation that escalate to hiring violent Pinkerton thugs, while Padgett’s wife, Inge, hopes to pacify the workers with company-owned libraries and schools. Sylvie leaves her job at the local newspaper and moves into the Padgetts’ luxurious manor for a higher-paying role as Inge’s live-in secretary in summer 1907. There she meets the Gradys, a Black couple whose complex ties to the Padgett family are later revealed, and falls in love with Padgett’s son, Jace, from a previous marriage. The hard-drinking and idealistic Jace seems to return Sylvie’s feelings but departs for college at the end of summer without saying goodbye. Sylvie returns to the newspaper, whose fearless female owner’s reporting on injustices at the mine inspires Sylvie to become a reporter. Meanwhile, winter salary stoppages and a death at the mine rekindle the drive toward unionization as Sylvie grows attracted to Lonahan. Sylvie’s vivid first-person narration captures her own maturing perceptions and the complex personalities of the major characters as well as supporting players including activist Mary “Mother” Jones. Manning shines at giving the era’s class, racial, and economic tensions a human face. This is one to savor. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Company. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

Praise for Gilded Mountain

"Manning’s prose is so evocative... The social issues of the novel’s time period, including the wealth gap, women’s rights and freedom of the press, artfully mirror those in 21st-century America." —Carol Memmott, The Washington Post

"Kate Manning’s fat, immersive novel transfixed me... Manning builds her characters’ challenges with such empathy, I didn’t even realize I was getting a crash course in the history of labor relations... There are views to admire, mysteries to be solved and love stories to escape into... awe-inspiring." —Elizabeth Egan, The New York Times

"Looking for a big historical novel to read by the fire? Manning’s novel will scratch your itch... a stellar read from an acclaimed author." —Bethanne Patrick, The Los Angeles Times

"An expansive novel of passions: love, beauty, suffering; struggles for labor rights, women's equality and the rights of formerly enslaved people... it contains romance, historical fiction and inspired, high-minded thinking on important issues, [with] lovely writing about the natural world... a painfully beautiful novel of big ideals, heartbreaks and tragedies, sewn together by an admirable and unforgettable heroine." —Shelf Awareness

"Stellar... Manning shines at giving the era’s class, racial, and economic tensions a human face. This is one to savor." —Publishers Weekly, *starred review*

"Manning’s bildungsroman not only provides a clear portrait of her young heroine; it captures the intensity of an unsettled time and place in American history.” —Kirkus

"The gold at the center of Kate Manning’s remarkably panoramic and meticulously researched new novel is one indomitable Sylvie Pelletier—an adventurer, a romantic, a crackerjack observer of worlds and hearts. Gilded Mountain is that rare thing: a historical page-turner that nimbly moves from gritty mining shafts to elegant drawing rooms of an earlier America with all its seething and striving, and where—then, as now—fates are decided by a stroke of luck or unluck, kindness and corruption, and reinvention." —Carol Edgarian, author of Vera

"Kate Manning is a master storyteller. Gilded Mountain is so immersive, so richly imagined, that reading it feels akin to time travel. Manning writes historical sagas like no one else; the dreamers, strivers, and opportunists who populate this tale possess a uniquely American desire to reinvent themselves, whatever it takes. An epic story of love, hope and perseverance." —#1 New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline

"Here is adventure of the first order, as young Sylvie Pelletier finds herself thrust into a seething union dispute in a marble-quarrying town. There’s violence in the wintry air, but also romance, as two charismatic men vie for Sylvie’s attention. Dread and love entwine, as the forces and people that transformed the 20th century converge on the town, all this rendered by Ms. Manning in prose as clean and sharp as the stone saws on the mountain. I raced through it. Sylvie is dynamite and Gilded Mountain is brilliant." —#1 New York Times bestselling author Erik Larson

"The best historical novels sing because, through them, we feel the reverberations of the past in the present day. Hard work, love, sorrow, revenge, joy — Gilded Mountain hums with all of this and more." —Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes

JANUARY 2023 - AudioFile

Narrator Dawn Harvey delivers this tale of labor and love, which takes place in a Colorado mining community from 1907 to 1909. Québecois American Sylvie Pelletier’s union-minded father toils in the marble mines of Moonstone. Despite her natural sympathies for the miners, Sylvie’s attracted to the mine owner’s charismatic son—and the tempting opulence of his life, so different from the rigors of her own. The African American servants who work for his family add a complicating counterpoint to the conflict. Sylvie narrates the events from decades later, and Harvey deftly balances distance with immediacy. She is distinctly less successful with her accents. Listeners familiar with the sounds of French and French-accented English may find themselves wincing frequently, and many of the secondary characterizations tip into caricature. A mixed bag. V.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2022-08-17
Everything old is (unfortunately) new again.

Echoes of current social problems resonate throughout Manning’s extensively researched saga of a young woman’s life in a Colorado mining town at the turn of the 20th century. Teenage Sylvie Pelletier’s family is forced to relocate from Vermont to Colorado after her father runs afoul of anti-union sentiments at his marble quarrying job. Naïvely, Sylvie looks forward to a more unfettered existence in Colorado, a thought which is quashed almost from the outset of her life there. The economic realities of working-class life in a company town are harsh, and winters in that setting are almost unendurable. After finishing school, Sylvie obtains a job as a jack-of-all-trades at the town’s newspaper, an opportunity which allows her a small measure of independence and income while opening her eyes to the value of an uncensored press. Soon, she is hired as a secretary by the dilettantish trophy wife of the mining company’s owner, a position which allows her an insider’s view of the family’s opulent lifestyle and deplorable labor and social practices. As the mine’s workers become increasingly militant about union organization in the face of their exploitation, Sylvie must reconcile her infatuation with the whimsical yet troubled heir to the mining fortune with her familial obligations (and an attraction to a labor organizer!). Issues of race relations and the toxic legacy of slavery figure prominently in the narrative, as do questions about the legitimacy of unions, corporate and workplace regulation, and the privatization of police functions (via the employment of murderous Pinkerton guards by the mine owners). Manning’s bildungsroman not only provides a clear portrait of her young heroine; it captures the intensity of an unsettled time and place in American history.

Manning’s historical fiction entertains and instructs.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178917503
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	11/01/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

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