The easy money in Pueblo is on her being hidden in the basement of one of the descendants of one of the many made men who called Pueblo home back in the day. The Palace was not maintained, built with a wood foundation and sadly, torn down many, many years ago. It was placed in a still lovely Mineral Palace Park near downtown. Mineral Palace was a grand building intended to showcase the ore and minerals to be found in Colorado. All mining for the raw materials takes place in the foothills about 90 miles away. Pueblo is securely set on the edge of the Great Plains and is in all ways the birth place of Colorado. There are no mining shacks near the Steel mill. Pueblo is a steel making town, not a mining town. This is supposed to be set in the mining town of Pueblo, Colorado.
The Mineral Palace is a startling and authentic story of survival in a world of decadence and depravity. With her gritty and magical prose, Heidi Julavits elegantly examines the darker side of paternity and maternity, as well as the intersection of parental love and merciful destruction. She returns again and again to the decaying architecture of the Mineral Palace within its eroding walls she is forced to confront her most terrifying secret, which becomes her only means for salvation. Through these new emotional entanglements, Bena slowly exposes not only the sexual corruption on which the entire town is founded, but also the lies enclosing her own marriage and the sanctity of motherhood. Bena is drawn to the Mineral Palace and to the lurid hallways of Pueblo's brothel, befriending a prostitute, Maude, and Red, a reticent cowpoke. To distract herself from worrying, Bena accepts a part-time position at Pueblo's daily newspaper, The Chieftain, reporting on the "good works' of the town's elite Ladies' Club leaders, women such as Reimer Lee Jackson and her plans to restore the town's crumbling monument tot he mining industry - the Mineral Palace - to its turn-of-the-century grandeur. Little can thrive in this bleak environment, neither Bena and Ted's marriage nor the baby, whom Bena believes - despite her husband's constant assurances - is slipping away from her. In the drought-ridden spring of 1934, Bena Jonnsen, her husband Ted, and their newborn baby relocate from their home in Minnesota to Pueblo, a Western plains town plagued by suffocating dust storms and equally suffocating social structures.
In a bold debut novel of the Great Depression, a young dosctor's wife uncovers the sordid secrets of a withering Colorado mining town, even as she struggles with the ravaging truths about her marriage and her child.
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