Shadow Mountain - Hardcover

Segal, Harriet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556112041 ISBN 13: 9781556112041

Publisher: Dutton, 1990

Spanning the years of the Great Depression and World War II, this saga of a Southern Jewish family moves from New York to Paris, from Monte Carlo to London, but always it returns to its main setting, the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
A Book of the Month Club Featured Alternate.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From the Author:

When I was very young, I spent my summers with my mother's relatives in Asheville, North Carolina. We would board the Lehigh Valley Railroad sleeping car in Wilkes-Barre, and the car would be switched to the Pennsylvania Railroad in New York. All through the night from my berth I could look out and see the passing cities...Washington, Baltimore, Richmond, Atlanta, until we finally stepped down at Biltmore Station, built by Commodore Vanderbilt when he commissioned a "castle" to be constructed at the top of the mountain. Asheville was a fairyland...a place where the air was fragrant with juniper and magnolia blossoms, the manicured lawns and flowering trees, the stately mansions and parks, and the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains embedded themselves on my vivd imagination. The days were filled with picnics and swimming at Beaver Lake; at night, I would go for pony rides or to the Recreation Park, a twinkling dreamland where the lights of the ferris wheel and the organ-grinder music of the merry-go-round beckoned to a child who could never get enough of them. We had to drive through a tunnel to get there and I pretended it was a magic mountain, and on the other side was Shangra La. As I grew older, some of the fascination wore off, but I continued to be taken in by the langorous pace of the Southern days, the softness of the Southern nights. At summer's end, I would return to my home in the "coal regions" of northeastern Pennsylvania, having acquired a Southern accent. My friends soon laughed me out of that. But that enchantment with the art deco city, a jewel in the mountainous region, remained with me and I knew that someday I would write a book about that magical place.

From the Inside Flap:

Shadow Mountain is the story of two beautiful Southern women bound to each other by ties of blood and jealousy...and love for the same man. Lauren...talented and brilliant, longs for something beyond the confines of her Southern Jewish upbringing, gets it and nearly loses it all in a cruel betrayal. Charlotte Lee...born to wealth and privilege, is enchanting, madcap, yet touched with grace and good fortune--finishing school in New York, marriage to the scion of a leading Wall Street family, a European honeymoon and a penthouse on Park Avenue. She has everything, except the one thing she most wants and seems likely to be denied. Lauren and Charlee...closer than sisters. No one ever thought of one without the other. For all of their lives they had loved each other, had been there for each other. But hadn't the seeds of jealousy been there, too? And wasn't it inevitable that those seeds would take root, given the wrong man, and the right conditions?

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.