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Rating: 
Summary: Superb historial fiction..Alef scores..
Review: "Pale Truth" by Daniel Alef promises to be the first in a great trilogy(I do wonder when "Measured Swords" will come out). Mary Ellen Price is the central character to this story, as we follow her extraordinary journey from mulatto slave to powerful San Fransiscan businesswoman. Alef really captures the rough and tumble early days of the City by the Bay, and he adds the intriguing and dark Colbraith O'Brien in the middle of the story. Some intense scenes, like an attempted rape in the first 100 pages; the havok that the "Hounds" cause in 1849; and the Vigilance Committee's lynching of an Aussie criminal. Powerful and moving, the story will leave you breathless.
Rating: 
Summary: You Can't Put it Down.
Review: A great book from cover to cover. I read a review about it in the American Library Association's Booklist and decided to get the novel. Pale Truth is one of the best books I have read in some time. Alef really develops his characters. They are not two-dimensional. He has a good grasp of hooking the reader from chapter to chapter. And the setting of the story in San Francisco in the gold rush era is nothing short of amazing. It's hard to imagine all the remarkable things that took place, the vigilantes, the Hounds, the political corruption, and the flow of inconceivable wealth. Alef really blurs the line between fiction and history, but the Afterword gives some clarification. I love a novel with illustrations, and Pale Truth has great ones. My only complaint: lack of sleep because I couldn't put the book down. Can't wait for the sequels.
Rating:
Summary: Read this and whet your appetite for next volume
Review: I saw Daniel Alef interviewed on PBS on a book talk show and thought I should read his novel. I ordered it used via amazon.com and was pleased to find it awaiting me at home one day. Even more pleasing was to find it was a first edition and autographed. What a surprise!Reading about this passing-for-white heroine of Alef's, Mary Ellen Price, makes for a nice diversionary look into the world of slavery prior to the Civil War, and the path that a chosen pale child is given out of the slavery of her black skinned mother and peers. It all seems rather dreamlike. How did such things really happen? But, of course, they did. I was fascinated by the courage and fortitude of Mary Ellen and her adept skill at learning enough to make it on her own, once she was granted her emancipation papers. Her business acumen, and sheer hard work make her most admirable, and her connections to the early movers and shakers of the Gold Rush days of San Francisco are quite skillfully enmeshed. It is hard to believe that San Francisco, the California's sophisticated bay city could have been so primitive and so rapidly populated and literally filled in to make space for inhabitation. Especially fascinating is the detail of the journey from the U. S. across Panama and finally on steamer to San Francisco. Unbelievable what people endured to get to the gold fields, all pre-Civil War. The politics and strategies of the leading characters to ensure themselves of continued land rights and wealth, and to gain leadership positions despite the issue of slavery laws is also intriguing. What a manipulation took place in those days, beyond what the average person would know. Having read many books on San Francisco's early days, this volume just adds more enrichment to the knowledge already reviewed. I will be glad to read the second volume of the California Chronicles. I do not think Alef to be the best of novelists, and the text is not edited all that well, but I enjoyed the read nonetheless and encourage others to read it as well.
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