The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold
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About this ebook
As a child, Lucy dreams of talking fairies and lives contentedly in the wooded suburbs of Boston; she grows up to be a successful animator of fairy-tale films. Or does she? She claims at moments to be a witch in the woods.
Like her sisters, who appeared in Bernheimer’s first two novels (The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold and The Complete Tales of Merry Gold), Lucy has a secret, but she is unable to fasten onto anything but brightness. Novelist Donna Tartt writes, “Lucy’s particular brand of optimism, blind to its own shadow, is very American—she is innocence holding itself apart so fastidiously that it becomes its opposite.”
This novel is a perfect end to the Gold family series, and the perfect introduction, for new readers, to Bernheimer’s enchanting body of work.
Kate Bernheimer
Kate Bernheimer has been called “one of the living masters of the fairy tale” (Tin House). She is the author of a novel trilogy and the story collections Horse, Flower, Bird and How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales, and the editor of four anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award winning and bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales and xo Orpheus: 50 New Myths. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she teaches fairy tales and creative writing.
Read more from Kate Bernheimer
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Reviews for The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold
5 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Shock and excitement! I did not think I would get this goodreads giveaway as the odds were very slim. I enjoyed this reading experience but how do I even begin to describe a book like this?? There's a bit of magic, some transformations, and even talking animals; all this and more bundled in a modern setting.
There are four children in the Gold family. Merry full of anger, Ketzia full of sorrow, an unnamed and seemingly indifferent brother, and the youngest sibling Lucy. Lucy Gold is filled with bliss and happiness, but that unyielding brightness takes her to a dark place. Her tales unfold along a nonlinear narrative. The stories bounce freely between the grown-up Lucy and the events of her early life.
A dense little book! I caught myself rereading passages. There were some I loved. I could just close my eyes and steep myself in the imagery they evoked. I liked the blank spaces and how my mind filled them with my own secrets. This giveaway was a nice way to be introduced to Kate Berheimer and I'll be checking out her other work in the future.
Book preview
The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold - Kate Bernheimer
Ketzia
chapter one
THE GOLDEN KEY
One winter day, when the ground outside my cottage was covered in snow, I went into the forest to bring back some wood. I loaded the wood onto a sled. I was so cold, I thought I would make a fire and sit beside it a while before I went home. No one waited for me in the cottage, apart from the dear spiders and mice. I cleared a space in the snow by scraping at it with a stick, intending to sit down and warm my bones. Soon I uncovered a golden key. Where there's a key,
I thought, there is surely some magic.
You might expect that I desired to dig more, and discover a locked iron box. You might expect me to have wished that this iron box were full of glittering things. You might expect me to have fit the key perfectly into the lock of the box, and that I would have turned it and turned it with hope. You might even wonder what terrible marvels I found in there, what sadness or evil they brought into the world. Yet I had no such desire to discover the sadness or evil. Sure as the forest is made up of trees and dirt and needles and worms, these are now and can always be lucky trees and dirt and needles and worms. It's a trick of the mind, this desire for peace. Yet just the same, I can assure you no story has ever waited for me. Only the darkened night with death by three. All happiness once was taken from me. Please solve the riddle; I can no longer speak.
chapter two
Under the bed, in a worn cardboard shoebox, lies a stuffed monkey with a pink and smudged face, and a pink satin ribbon taped onto one ear. The monkey wears a pink plastic helmet and used to hang from the ceiling tied to a rope. Lucy Gold, the youngest of the four children, got the monkey from Ketzia, who got it from Merry. The monkey skipped over the brother, as it was pink. (He preferred rose, he always said.)
Lucy abides by favorite things—especially colors. Once, she overheard an angular woman announce to Mrs Gold in the kitchen, I disdain whimsy,
and wondered how anyone could. Lucy prefers whimsy to anything else—except perhaps Monkee, with her almost-gone fur and fraying rope—or was it a noose, as Merry once said? Lucy rejects the creepiness of the noose-notion, and concentrates rapt attention on the goodly essence of the poignant, sad monkey.
Though very young, Lucy has already learned quite a bit about the world that she lives in, the attention that it desires: about her two older sisters who don't get along and about how to get along with both of them well. She sees that the straight-haired one who cries is annoying to the curly-haired one who is mean; and she sees that to avoid annoying the mean one, she must exude charm. To avoid hurting the sad one, she must comfort her lavishly in private.
Lucy has learned that her brother does not have much to do with the sisters, including herself, though he does not seem to have much to do with anything at all except maybe his blocks. He does like having his fingernails painted by Grandma—and who doesn't, with that lamp in the shape of a hand that you rest your own hand upon during the painting? (Glows yellow, gets warm.)
The only naturally sunny child of all the Gold girls, Lucy cherishes the airy nursery room in which she sleeps, with its orange gauze curtains and the heater's radiant hiss. Ketzia and Merry sleep in two newer rooms down the hall: Ketzia's pink, containing a dollhouse, Merry's green and featuring a toadstool lamp. The brother's room is blue. Mysteriously it glows with video games. In summer, a box set in Lucy's windowsill roars. Each night, whether winter or summer, autumn or spring, Lucy lies perfectly still in her sleep: stunning expression upon her face, hands clasped under her chin. On the pink sheets are depicted green fairies, half moons and violet