Goldenseal

October 9, 2023
In this powerful saga of a family’s immigration and reinvention, Hummel (Motherland) explores themes of love, betrayal, and reconciliation. Lucie Weber, the cherished only daughter of a German-born hotelier and a Jewish mother, becomes Lacey Crane after emigrating with her family as a young girl from Prague to New York City during the Great Depression. At 13, while convalescing at a summer camp in Maine to clear her consumptive cough, she meets Edith, the hardscrabble daughter of a local widower who physically abuses her. They immediately bond and keep in touch between reuniting at the camp each summer through their teen years. When Lacey is in her mid-20s, she accompanies her father to Los Angeles, where he’s pursuing a hotel deal, and Edith joins her. There, Lacey marries dashing movie executive Cal, not realizing Cal has fallen for Edith until Edith ends up getting pregnant by him. Forty-four years later, in 1990, Lacey agrees to meet with Edith, though she’s still upset over Edith’s betrayal. Hummel skillfully evokes the Cranes’ gilded world of hotels and Hollywood, and deeply explores the women’s fraught friendship from both points of view. Readers will be rapt. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary.