the ice cream queen of orchard street reviews

Ice Cream Queen is polished yet pointed, deceptively cheery but shaded in the sinister - an upside-down, funhouse treat. A rich literary feast of 31 flavors (and twice that many colors, scents and sounds), Ice Cream Queen is a familiar schmatta-to-silk brocade story of immigrant New York. And that, darlings, is all that matters in telling a good story.'― Dallas Morning News Although this is Gilman's fiction debut, she knows how to tell a sweeping story.Lillian Dunkle is sometimes sympathetic, sometimes reprehensible, but always fascinating. She blends it in a delicious swirl, and adds a topical spin.'― Chicago Tribune ('Editor's Choice') smart, darkly comic story, which is perfect for a summer weekend read.Gilman understands the great sweep of the 20th century, from life in a tenement on Orchard Street, to Italian Communists, Joe McCarthy, McDonald's franchises, suburbanization and, of course, the history of ice cream in America. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. She'll do anything to keep her life from falling apart. Conniving, profane, and irreverent, she is a supremely complex woman who prefers a good stiff drink to an ice cream cone. Yet Lillian Dunkle is nothing like the whimsical motherly persona she crafts for herself in the media. Lillian's rise to fame and fortune spans seventy years and is inextricably linked to the course of American history itself, from Prohibition to the disco days of Studio 54. Slowly, she transforms herself into Lillian Dunkle, 'The Ice Cream Queen' - doyenne of an empire of ice cream franchises and a celebrated television personality. She falls in love with a gorgeous, illiterate radical named Albert, and they set off across America in an ice cream truck. As she learns the secrets of his trade, she begins to shape her own destiny.

Taken in by a tough-loving Italian ices peddler, she manages to survive through cunning and inventiveness. Yet no sooner do they land on the squalid Lower East Side of Manhattan, than Malka is crippled and abandoned in the street. Bedazzled by tales of gold and movie stardom, she tricks them into buying tickets for America. In 1913, little Malka Treynovsky flees Russia with her family. An epic story of a fierce young immigrant's rise to become the greatest ice cream maker in America until her past begins to catch up with her putting everything she has spent her life building at stake in this 'upside-down, funhouse treat ( USA Today).'

The ice cream queen of orchard street reviews