Blix

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About this book

The novel opens at Sunday breakfast in the Bessemer house on the Washington Street hill, where the bay window looks out over San Francisco Bay. Nineteen-year-old Travis Bessemer runs the meal, keeps the clumsy maid and the younger children in order, and settles a quarrel over watermelon seeds squirted across the table.

Her friend Condy Rivers, who has called twice a week for a year and a half, decides that she has always been "Blix," and the name sticks. The two agree to be chums with no more foolishness, and amuse themselves by answering a personal notice in the newspaper, arranging for a retired sea captain to meet a woman who signs herself K. D. B. at Luna's restaurant, each wearing white marguerites. When she walks in, Captain Jack tears the flowers from his lapel before he has seen her face.

By the New Year the friendship has turned into a question Condy asks in a room high above the city: does Blix love him?

About the author

Frank Norris

Frank Norris (1870-1902) was an American novelist and a leading voice of literary naturalism. Influenced by Emile Zola, he wrote fiction that framed human behavior as the product of blunt biological and economic forces. He died at thirty-two, leaving his ambitious wheat trilogy unfinished.