"San Francisco's rough-and-tumble early years couldn't provide a richer setting for this lively historical novel. Mr. Alef makes the Barbary Coast days come alive with his fast-paced, well researched and totally entertaining story. The sweeping tale of a freed slave's migration from a Georgia plantation to the emerging metropolis of San Francisco is a page-turner on its own, but for anyone interested in the history of the City by the Bay, Pale Truth is a must-read." -- Willie Brown Mayor of San Francisco
           

"This large but carefully plotted and certainly historically accurate novel celebrates the rich cultural heritage that has been the hallmark of California life. The story begins in 1829 in the state of Georgia, with the birth into slavery of an unusual baby she has eyes of two different colors. The baby's name is Mary Ellen and her mother is credited with or, more accurately, feared for being a voodoo queen. Mary Ellen grows up the favorite of the wife of the owner of the plantation where she was born to say nothing of also growing up beautiful. The plantation owner's wife places Mary Ellen in the hands of a male friend, for him to see to her education and to hold a sizable amount of money in trust for her future. So off to New Orleans Mary Ellen goes, but Missouri and Cincinnati follow as sites of her continuing education in life. But San Francisco is where her fortune awaits her, the sights and sounds of that young and raw city fairly wafting."-- American Library Association Book List
           

"California joined the Union in 1850; just in time for the state's sesquicentennial comes this big, ambitious and well-researched debut, the first in a planned historical trilogy from Santa Ynez Valley lawyer Alef. In 1829, a light-skinned daughter is born to a young slave on a Georgia plantation. Rejected by her real mother, baby Mary Ellen is take into the big house under the tutelage of the plantation owner's childless wife; before dying of cancer, she entrusts the 13-year-old's future to a friend, Americus Price, leaving her a substantial inheritance and granting her freedom at age 18. After years passing for white in a New Orleans convent school, Mary Ellen comes of age, visits Price's Missouri plantation and travels on to Cincinnati, where she encounters the abolitionist John Brown. By 1849, disappointment and trauma in Ohio lead Mary Ellen to seek a fresh start in California. On her way by ship, she nurses the Scotsman Thomas Brand back to health and assists the embittered ex-Manhattanite Colbraith O'Brien. The trio then make their way to San Francisco, where Mary Ellen, Colbraith, Brand and a large cast of minor characters enter the fast-growing town's rough politics and its burgeoning net of business endeavors, from real estate holdings to squabbling fire companies. Will strangers from her past wreck Mary Ellen's new life by revealing her racial heritage? Alef based his key characters on real people: an afterword, timeline and bibliography lay out his historical sources. Readers will enjoy keeping track of Mary Ellen's complex life and the intricate dealings among the San Francisco figures she meets. Alef's prose, if hardly subtle, keeps the plot moving, and his settings are effective. This entertaining saga will leave many readers eager for the planned sequels." -- Publisher's Weekly
           

"In the school of E.L. Doctorow's classic, Ragtime, Mr. Alef has spent 10 years crafting these tales that venture with historic authenticity and page turning passion in a past world." -- Noah benShea