My new historical novel, The Depth of Beauty is now out in the world (on sale for just 99 cents here!) and already it’s gotten great feedback. I love the story because, apart from the romance, it contains a lot of fascinating material about the time period around the turn of the twentieth century. I’ve been sharing tidbits on my FB page and I thought I’d collect them in bunches and share them on my blog:
A IS FOR ANTIBIOTICS AND ANTISERUM
The Depth of Beauty tells the story of a wealthy young man named Will Firestone who encounters the exotic immigrant culture of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the early 1900’s. While he’s in Chinatown, several people contract the plague—the dreaded bubonic plague. No doctors had the cure. Nobody had created a vaccine that could build up antibodies in your system to guard against getting the disease, and even worse, nobody had invented antibiotics, which can treat the disease once you get it.
image courtesy IAGenWebProject.org
The only thing available was something called an antiserum, which enabled a person’s immune system to temporarily wake up and fight off the plague germs once they attacked. The serum in this case was made from the blood of horses that had gotten the plague and lived to whinny about it.
image courtesy Pinterest.com
Today the most common antiserum you hear about is antivenin, which you take after you’ve been bitten by a poisonous snake. Read The Depth of Beauty and you’ll see we’ve come a long, long way in how we treat people who get the plague … because people can still catch the bubonic plague, right here in the United States.
B IS FOR BOUND FEET
When Westerners learn about the ancient Chinese custom of binding feet, they recoil. Who in their right mind would systematically break a young girl’s arches and toes until they curled into little claws, effectively crippling the woman for the rest of her life?
Image courtesy of Youtube.com
The fact is, for centuries, a small foot in China represented the height of civility, societal class, and even beauty. According to Amanda Foreman of Smithsonian Magazine, the most desirable brides possessed a three-inch foot, known as a “golden lotus.” You could get by with a four-inch foot (a “silver lotus”), but anything over five inches – fuggedabout it.
Image from caferoyal.wordpress.com
Kind of like Victorian England, where the ideal waist size for young women was just 16-18 inches. Imagine what it would take to get your body into that kind of silhouette!
C IS FOR CHICKEN FOOT
In the first part of The Depth of Beauty, fifteen year-old Mandy comes to live with her new guardian, Katherine Firestone, and Katherine’s brother Will. At one point she teaches Will a game of dominoes, called “Chicken Foot,” that her father taught her. If you know dominoes, “Chicken Foot” or “Chicken Dominoes,” is one of the “Mexican train” types of games. Anywhere from two to eight people can play; the object is to get rid of your tiles before anybody else does by matching your numbers to those already on the table. You can see in the pic how the game got its name – cluck! cluck!
A game of Chicken Foot in progress.
I played it for the first time last week and almost won. The basic rules are easy to pick up, but I can see how knowing a bit of strategy might come in handy as you learn how to block others from laying down too many tiles and winning the game. Whatever you do, don’t get caught with a “double zero” (essentially, a blank domino tile). That’ll cost you fifty points!
D-E-F next week!
