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In 1907, Blanche leaves her small town for New York City, where she’ll be boarding and taking piano lessons from a renowned professor living in Manhattan. The letters she sends home to her parents downplay how easily Blanche blossoms in the city. A bright young woman, Blanche quickly becomes a favorite of a variety of personalities, including painters, musicians and intellectuals. But it isn’t until she is forced to explore the subterranean tunnels of the newly built subway --- and meet the things living in those tunnels --- that the story begins to get exciting.

In the second story, Blanche moves from New York to Hollywood, where she is hired to compose music for one of the new moving picture studios. In addition to learning about the movies, Blanche learns about the labor movement firsthand, as she works to expose the truth about a group of antilabor strikebreakers who turn a peaceful demonstration into a riot.

Rounding out the collection is the story of Blanche’s arrival in Paris, where she is to perform a series of concerts, only to learn the concerts have been canceled and her promoter has disappeared. Mix in a murder, avant-garde artists and a science experiment involving the Eiffel Tower, and Blanche is sent running for her life.

All three stories take place in a romantic time in history, when life and technology changed as quickly as they do today. Those changes happened on a much grander scale, and the excitement and buzz surrounding the building of the New York subway system was as momentous to them as nanocomputers are to us. Reading very much like a carefully written letter sent home to conservative, unworldly parents, the dry writing is perfectly juxtaposed with the vibrant, active pictures, and there is much more going on in the images than the words on the page alone convey.

Some readers may interpret the slowness of the writing as being dull, but those who stick with it will be rewarded with stories as exciting as the woman the stories are about. Once again, Rick Geary doesn’t disappoint.

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