You know I love my historical fiction, and I am a fan of Kate Quinn, so of course I bought The Phoenix Crown, the joint endeavour of Kate Quinn and Janie Chang. I like The Phoenix Crown. It is an easy, fast-paced read that I breezed through in one day.

The Phoenix Crown is set in San Francisco in 1906 and is mainly told through the alternating perspectives of two women. The first is Gemma Garland, a beautiful blonde from the American Midwest who is a soprano with the Metropolitan Opera travelling company. She has travelled from New York to San Francisco for a performance and to catch up with her best friend, an artist named Nellie. But when Gemma arrives in San Francisco, she finds out that Nellie had supposedly left town weeks before.

The second perspective is that of Chinese American Suling Feng, who was born and raised in San Francisco. Her family owns a laundry business in Chinatown, but after her parents die, her Third Uncle takes over the business and starts gambling the profits away. He also arranges for Suling to marry a much older man who already has two wives. Suling does not want to get married, so she starts planning her escape from San Francisco.

Gemma and Suling’s stories are entwined through their relationships with Alice Eastwood, based on the real-life Canadian American botanist who was a curator at the California Academy of Sciences, and Henry Thornton, a charming, rich man with a darkness to him, and a penchant for collecting Chinese art and antiquities, including the Phoenix Crown, which was looted during the fall of Beijing’s Summer Palace. The events in the story lead up to the infamous earthquake of 1906 that resulted in San Francisco burning to the ground over the course of three days. Thornton uses the earthquake to disappear, taking the Phoenix Crown with him. Then the Phoenix Crown resurfaces five years later in Paris, bringing Gemma and Suling back together to get justice from Thornton.

Despite being written by two different authors, The Phoenix Crown is a cohesive novel. Although Gemma and Suling’s experiences are vastly different, I did not feel like I was reading two separate stories. Gemma and Suling are dissimilar in their temperaments, but they are both admirable characters. The Phoenix Crown is a popcorn flick in book form that you can just sit back and enjoy. It is entertaining to read, and even though it comments on the racism and sexism of the time, it does not ask too much from the reader. 👍👍