The Blood Red Dawn

San Francisco, 1914. Claire Robson sits in a pew while a Serbian pastor speaks of his burning homeland, and something in her cracks open. Around her, the congregation shifts impatiently, eager for the supper to follow. But Claire has heard something true, something that exposes the thin veneer of her own comfortable world. At the reception, she watches the city's elite move through their rituals of belonging, and understands with piercing clarity that she stands outside all their circles: too restless for her mother's expectations, too aware of the cage her father's legacy has built around her. World War I looms on the horizon, but Claire's war is already here, fought in the silence of her own longing for connection, for purpose, for a self that might finally be her own. Dobie renders a young woman's interior life with startling acuity, capturing the particular anguish of a woman who sees too much and belongs too little.