The Mineral Palace displayed a collection of Colorado ores and geological specimens until it closed its doors in 1935. The book is named for Pueblo’s famed Mineral Palace, a lavish, sprawling building with sphere-topped columns, which opened its doors in 1891 as part of a campaign to promote mining during the bonanza era. And if you’re a Colorado history buff, you will delight in her deft descriptions of formidable dust storms and the Great Depression. The fast-paced, multi-layered plot and Julavits’ dark, metaphoric writing will keep you reading. And it’s told in prose that’s as lyrical as poetry. Mineral Palace is a textured novel, full of twists and turns and punctuated by heartbreaking revelations. What follows is a surprising series of events that Bena must grapple with - while simultaneously dealing with problems at home, and with ghosts from her past that have haunted her for years. Bena watches people coming and going from Buck’s Silo, a rowdy bar, and becomes so intrigued by a pregnant prostitute and her cowboy companion that she makes an effort to befriend them. And she’s also distraught because her marriage, which she’d hoped would become stronger after the move west, is as troubled as ever.ĭepressed, Bena decides that working outside of her home might lessen her bleak mood, so she gets a job reporting on society women for the Pueblo Chieftain.īut then she becomes increasingly interested in the darker side of life in Pueblo, which she gets glimpses of from her window at work. She’s convinced that he’s not developing quite right. With local headlines announcing an outbreak of “Dust Pneumonia” and a child’s death from suffocation, Bena, who is prone to superstition anyway, becomes increasingly concerned about her baby’s health. The dust storms that continually rip into town strip the paint off cars, take the leaves from trees, and force Bena to barricade herself and her baby in the house and hang wet bed sheets over the windows to keep out the dust. Pueblo is barren, drab, and unseasonably hot the summer they arrive in their Ford touring car. Heidi Julavits masterfully describes the desperate landscape in Mineral Palace, a novel about Bena Jonssen, the wife of a doctor and the mother of a newborn, who moves from Minnesota to Pueblo, Colorado in the midst of the Great Depression.
Colorado history – December 2003 – Colorado Central MagazineĭURING THE DUST BOWL YEARS of the 1930s, the West was a sea of dead grass and bone white dirt, of abandoned towns, empty buildings, and unpopulated streets.
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