Review by Booklist Review
Hummel (Lesson in Red, 2021) explores the complexities of female friendship in her latest outing, set in Los Angeles in 1990. Best friends since childhood but now estranged, Lacey and Edith haven't seen each other in decades when Edith shows up at the hotel that Lacey calls home. Lacey is in no hurry to see her old friend; their parting was not a pleasant one. Their friendship dates back to the 1930s, when wealthy Lacey was sent to summer camp in the early days of WWII and befriended working-class Edith. Lacey offered Edith an escape from her abusive single father by inviting Edith to live with her family. Lacey finally allows Edith to come up to her suite, and the two septuagenarians catch up over the course of a long evening over a carefully curated meal before finally addressing the betrayal and heartbreak that cleaved them apart. 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.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
"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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
