A Tame Surrender, a Story of the Chicago Strike

Chicago, 1894. The city trembles with labor unrest while Florence Allison navigates her own kind of upheaval. Small in stature but enormous in presence, Florence sports the era's ridiculous fashion: wings sprouting from her shoulders like balloons. She's impossible to ignore, yet society insists on categorizing her anyway. The previous summer on the Rhine, she met Floyd Forrest, a man as reserved and thoughtful as she is vivacious. Now everyone assumes they're engaged, but the truth is more complicated: she's chosen him, though he's yet to fully claim her. As the strike looms over Chicago, Charles King uses this backdrop of class conflict and social upheaval to test his unconventional heroine. The prose fizzes with ironic wit, particularly in Florence's brother's cutting observations about the gap between what people claim and what they actually are. A Tame Surrender is a period romance that understands how love, like labor relations, hinges on power, patience, and knowing when to hold fast and when to yield.