Goldenseal: A Novel

by Maria Hummel

Overview

A Gentleman in Moscow meets My Brilliant Friend in this novel of two estranged friends who reunite to confront each other and the devastating betrayal that tore them apart

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640096066
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	01/09/2024
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	81,406
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

MARIA HUMMEL is a novelist and poet. Her novel, Still Lives, was a Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine Book Club pick, Book of the Month Club pick, and BBC Culture Best Book of 2018, and has been optioned for television and translated into multiple languages. She is also the author of Lesson in Red; Motherland, a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year; and House and Fire, winner of the APR/Honickman Poetry Prize. She has worked and taught at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Stanford University; and the University of Vermont. She lives in Vermont with her husband and sons.

Editorial Reviews

10/09/2023

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. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

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

APRIL 2024 - AudioFile

2023-09-21
“And yet the stories about female friendship rarely end well,” opines one of the protagonists in Hummel’s close examination of one such blighted relationship.

Estranged for more than four decades, former friends and confidantes Lacey and Edith reunite for a meeting, in 1990, on Lacey’s turf. (The encounter, orchestrated at Edith’s behest, would have to be at Lacey’s place, as she now rarely leaves her hotel suite in Los Angeles.) Over the course of a long evening and a carefully planned room service dinner, the two aging women discuss their earlier relationship and subsequent lives. It’s clear that both bear emotional scars related to the apparently seismic rupture of their friendship and the facts of that breach are slowly revealed over the course of the night. Each of the old friends attempts to justify her own position in a series of sharp discussions and emotional monologues but a heartwarming rapprochement doesn’t seem in the offing when one of the two indicates she’s hated the other for four decades (and still does). Lacey’s backstory is complicated by a family life marked by sadness and loss, much of it attributable to the horrific effects of the Holocaust upon her family. The scarifying effects of Edith’s family life relate to poverty, violence, and isolation but the outcome was the same: a young girl who revels in the friendship and understanding of a first close ally. Ranging from pre–World War II Europe to the glamorous era of postwar Hollywood with stops in New York City and a girl’s camp set in the northern woods, Hummel’s dissection of what went wrong between Lacey and Edith borrows from both stagecraft and fairy tale in its analysis.

Hummel delivers a lifetime of pathos and revelation in the course of one night.

Kirkus Reviews

Los Angeles Times, A Must Read Title for January
Zibby Mag, A Most Anticipated Title of the Year
CrimeReads, A Best Reviewed Book of the Month

"A meditation on female friendship, loneliness, and how to move on after betrayal, Goldenseal is both melancholy and escapist." —Zibby Owens, Good Morning America

"Goldenseal is a novel about agency and friendship whose questions reverberate far beyond its two protagonists and their particular time and place. Haunting and tragic, it nevertheless lands on a hopeful note." —Ilana Masad, Los Angeles Times

"Radiant . . . Goldenseal provides plenty of golden moments, an elixir for these times." —Gordon Dossett, Manchester Journal

"Maria Hummel probes the complexities of female friendship with a deeply immersive writing style, showcasing her poetic chops and skill in crafting nuance. In this entrancing novel—her fifth—the author weaves a complex tapestry of nostalgia, regret, betrayal, and love against the backdrop of Los Angeles in fading splendor." —Jenny Bartoy, The Rumpus

"An inventive, immersive book recounting the particular past, old hurts and late healing of two singular characters." —Sarah McCraw Crow, BookPage

"In this taut, tense, and layered novel, Hummel deftly examines the lives of two flawed women against the backdrop of the upheavals of the twentieth century." —Booklist

"In this powerful saga of a family’s immigration and reinvention, Hummel explores themes of love, betrayal, and reconciliation . . . 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." —Publishers Weekly

"Ranging from pre–World War II Europe to the glamorous era of postwar Hollywood with stops in New York City and a girl’s camp set in the northern woods, Hummel’s dissection of what went wrong between Lacey and Edith borrows from both stagecraft and fairy tale in its analysis. Hummel delivers a lifetime of pathos and revelation in the course of one night." —Kirkus Reviews

"Suffused with the atmosphere of the past, this exquisitely evocative tale pays tribute to the glamour of old Hollywood. But Goldenseal is no mere nostalgia fest. With wit and acumen, Hummel explores how our divergent interpretations of events can color our memories, locking us in spirals of alienation . . . Goldenseal is a thought-provoking read that makes us question the stories we build from our own memories." —Margot Harrison, Seven Days

“For anyone who has ever had—and lost—that rarest of gifts: a true friend. A deft, exquisite novel, one that will stay in your heart like a memory, as if it were one of your very own.” —Barbara Bourland, author of The Force of Such Beauty

“I devoured Goldenseal, enchanted by the satin prose and dialogue as smooth as cognac. I loved everything about this story of exquisite tenderness, passionate friendship and betrayal, the electric rendezvous of past and future. The backdrop is an L.A. hotel, haunted by a bygone elegance; but it’s the voices of Edith and Lacey that truly astonish. They’re still ringing in my ears, clear as a hotel fountain.” —Miciah Bay Gault, author of Goodnight Stranger

“Goldenseal is the rare novel whose style perfectly evokes an earlier era while its meaning feels wholly contemporary. Like the characters within it, we realize how hard it is to understand our lives without the wider view that only comes with time. Sweeping yet intimate, and with characters who feel as alive as our closest friends, Goldenseal is a marvel.” —Stacey Swann, author of Olympus, Texas

“Goldenseal is a savagely beautiful novel about the dangers and damages of passionate lifelong female friendship, intertwined with a brilliantly wrought elegy for the twentieth century. Hummel is a powerful writer. This book is extraordinary.” —Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of The Great Man and Welcome Home, Stranger

From the Publisher