Mayhem in the Mountains: A Gilded City Series by Jane Loeb RubinMayhem in the Mountains is the 4th book in Jane Loeb Rubin’s Gilded City Series, a fictional exploration of the lives of her great-grandmother’s immigrant family. I haven’t read the earlier books, and it isn’t essential to follow the story. (That said, I did find the number of characters overwhelming at the beginning.) The novel starts in June 1924 with 18-year-old Ella taking her younger brother, Robbie, and running away from their abusive father. Ella knows that she’s got relatives on a farm in New York State’s Catskill Mountains and hopes that the relatives will let them stay for the summer.
To her immense relief, the relatives not only welcome them, but they give Ella paid work and a realistic hope of attending nursing school when the summer’s over. At first everything seems idyllic, but as time goes by, she finds herself dealing with threats from both the Ku Klux Klan (who knew the KKK was so far north?) and a major Jewish bootlegger.
I liked that so many of the characters have secrets, which get revealed gradually through the book, and that the women are shown as strong, independent-minded characters. That said, I found that many of the characters spoke and thought in such similar voices that I kept having to refer to the chapter headings to remind myself whose perspective I was getting. Perhaps if I had already known the characters from the earlier books in the series, this would have been less of an issue.
(This review first appeared in the Historical Novel Society’s book reviews section.)
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