Showing results by narrator "Holly Palance" in All Categories

As a girl, Zorrie Underwood’s modest and hardscrabble home county was the only constant in her young life. After losing both her parents, Zorrie moved in with her aunt, whose own death orphaned Zorrie all over again, casting her off into the perilous realities and sublime landscapes of rural, Depression-era Indiana. Drifting west, Zorrie survived on odd jobs, sleeping in barns and under the stars, before finding a position at a radium processing plant. At the end of each day, the girls at her factory glowed from the radioactive material.

When Police Chief Alton Gravely and Officer Carothers escalate the feud between “Torreya’s finest” and conjure woman Eulalie Jenkins by running her off the road into a North Florida swamp, the borrowed pickup truck is salvaged, but Eulalie is missing and presumed dead. Her cat, Lena, survives. Lena could provide an accurate account of the crime, but the county sheriff is unlikely to interview a pet. Lena doesn’t think Eulalie is dead, but the conjure woman’s family and friends don’t believe her.

The terms of 50-year-old Lily McVay’s divorce settlement are quirky at best: live in her ex-husband’s ancestral mausoleum of a house, restore her dead ex-mother-in-law’s renowned garden, and host the small Gulf Coast town’s overblown annual soiree. Lily needs help in the worst way.

The fascinating lives of celebrated Broadway producer Irene Mayer Selznick (A Streetcar Named Desire; The Chalk Garden), and leading socialite Edith Mayer Goetz are explored in this revealing double bio. As the daughters of iconic MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, they were Hollywood royalty. Through their marriages to high-profile film producers - Irene to David O. Selznick (Gone with the Wind) and Edith to future Universal mogul William Goetz - the sisters each carved out her own distinctive niche in Hollywood while supporting and influencing their husbands’ work.

Dr. Catherine "Cathy" DeAngelis has shattered numerous glass ceilings in medicine for herself and generations of women she's mentored. Raised in 1940s hardscrabble Pennsylvania coal mining country, Cathy's unyielding determination and indomitable self-belief steamrolled medicine's entrenched sexism. In a life filled with "firsts," she was named the first woman editor-in-chief of JAMA - the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Edie - smart, self-assured, beautiful - always worked hard. She worked as a teller at a bank, she worked to save her first marriage, and later, she worked to raise her daughter even as her second marriage came apart. Really, Edie just wanted a good life, but everywhere she turned, her looks defined her. Two brothers fought over her. Her second husband became unreasonably possessive and jealous. Her daughter resented her. And now, as a grandmother, Edie finds herself harassed by a younger man. It’s been a lifetime of proving that she is allowed to exist in her own sphere.

Float Up, Sing Down is the story of a single day. But in that day, how much teeming life! The residents of this rural town have their routines, their preferences, their joys, grudges, and regrets. Gossip is paramount. Lives are entwined. Retired sheriffs climb corn bins and muse on lost love, French teachers throw firecrackers out of barn windows, and teenagers borrow motorcycles to ride the back roads. Each of the fourteen stories of Float Up, Sing Down follows one character’s day in the life in one of Hunt’s most beloved and enduring landscapes.