Calico Palace: A Novel

Gwen Bristow

May 2014 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

The New York Times bestseller that brings to life the passionate, adventurous men and women who transformed San Francisco during the California Gold Rush.

Kendra comes to San Francisco, a sleepy town of nine hundred people, because her stepfather, an army colonel, is charged with overseeing its defenses during the Mexican War. Marny arrives from Honolulu to set up a gambling hall. Neither expects to be swept up in one of history’s greatest adventures, which begins when tiny flakes of gold are discovered in the California hills.
 
As both young women follow their dreams into the mining camps and back to a rapidly growing San Francisco, they encounter ambitious settlers, sailors, miners, ranchers, and mysterious drifters, men who will offer them love or friendship or will break their hearts. Yet Kendra and Marny’s lives stay centered on the Calico Palace, the little gambling operation in a tent in Shiny Gulch that becomes the most opulent gambling house in California.
 
Thrilling and rich in authentic historical detail, Calico Palace is first-rate historical fiction that informs and entertains.

Ratings and reviews

The characters are typical stereotypes. Young innocent girl who doesnt think she is pretty and is falling for older experienced man. The writing is descriptive but hearing kendra's thoughts made me roll my eyes at her overdone naivity. Maybe it gets better but i couldnt get past the first 50 pages.

I do not have the ebook but I have had 2 paperbacks that I have read over and over since the 70's and I have got the hardback. It is one of my favorite books. I read it every few years. It isn't like the books written today with all the descriptive sex and 4 letter words every other line.

One of the best books l have read in ages, even tho it was written 45 years(1970) ago. 📖📖📖📖📖

About the author

Gwen Bristow (1903–1980), the author of seven bestselling historical novels that bring to life momentous events in American history, such as the siege of Charleston during the American Revolution (Celia Garth) and the great California gold rush (Calico Palace), was born in South Carolina, where the Bristow family had settled in the seventeenth century. After graduating from Judson College in Alabama and attending the Columbia School of Journalism, Bristow worked as a reporter for New Orleans’ Times-Picayune from 1925 to 1934. Through her husband, screenwriter Bruce Manning, she developed an interest in longer forms of writing—novels and screenplays.

After Bristow moved to Hollywood, her literary career took off with the publication of Deep Summer, the first novel in a trilogy of Louisiana-set historical novels, which also includes The Handsome Road and This Side of Glory. Bristow continued to write about the American South and explored the settling of the American West in her bestselling novels Jubilee Trail, which was made into a film in 1954, and in her only work of nonfiction, Golden Dreams. Her novel Tomorrow Is Forever also became a film, starring Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles, and Natalie Wood, in 1946.