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Goldenseal

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Downtown Los Angeles, 1990. Alone in her luxury hotel suite, the reclusive Lacey Crane receives a message: Edith is waiting for her in the lobby. Former best friends, Lacey and Edith haven't spoken to one another in over four decades. As young adults meeting at summer camp in Maine, and later making their way in the glitzy spotlight of postwar Hollywood, Edith and Lacey share a deep-rooted bond that once saved them from isolation and despair, providing comfort from the public and private traumas that they had each endured and which a newly optimistic world was eager to forget. Told through a continuous, twisting conversation that unfolds over the course of a single evening, in which each woman tells her story and reveals long-hidden secrets, the narratives of Edith and Lacey burn with atmosphere, mystery, resentment, and regret. Set against the vivid landscapes of Los Angeles and unfolding with the evanescence of a dream or a memory, Goldenseal peels away the layers of an intimate female friendship to reveal a stirring and haunting story about the search for connection and the lingering echoes of lost love.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Hillary Huber narrates the story of Lacey and Edith, former friends from different worlds who come together to face and heal their forty-year estrangement. Hummel's powerful prose is brought to life by Huber's lyrical voice. Lacey, the child of immigrants who escaped from Germany in the 1930s as Hitler came into power and found success in California, befriended Edith, daughter of the caretaker at the summer camp where they met and began a surprisingly strong friendship. Later, when they confront each other, Edith has a determined voice as she forces the reclusive Lacey to hear her side of their story. Lacey sounds more aloof and resistant, but slowly reopens her heart. Huber gives Lacey's parents, Papi and Mutti, voices that carry hints of their German roots. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

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