An action-packed historical novel whose charismatic characters take
the reader from the roaring twenties to the fiery nineties in America's
favorite left coast city. Los Angeles has never been better portrayed
than by novelist James Oliver Goldsborough in Blood and Oranges.
Blood and Oranges: The Story of Los Angeles tells the story of how Los
Angeles got that way-- you know, THAT way, with Hollywood,
mega-churches, impossible traffic, oil wells on the beaches, murders in
the foothills, and riots in the suburbs. You have to go back a ways to
understand, back to when the water came. Twin brothers Willie and Eddie
Mull, a preacher and a high roller, arrive with the water and set out to
make their marks. They rise with the city and reach the top.
The brothers have much to answer for, especially to their children.
Maggie and Lizzie, Eddie's daughters, don't like Eddie's mob ties, oil
wells, or his gambling ship in Santa Monica Bay. Cal Mull, Willie's son,
watches his father rise to become the nation's top evangelistic
preacher, but like his idol, St. Augustine, Willie is weak in the flesh.
Maggie, an aviator, wants women to fly in the war, but must get past
Howard Hughes and find help in Washington. Lizzie works for the LA
Times, wants women to be able to write for more than just the society
pages in the paper, and does her best to get crime out of the D.A.'s
department.
(And what happened to the trolleys that once covered 1,100 miles of city
streets, half the distance to Chicago?)
The second generation of the family reacts to the first, but then must
face the revolt of its own children.
In Blood and Oranges, we follow and fall in love with the City of
Angels as it transforms itself over three generations, rolling with the
waves that lap its Pacific shores, a place of plazas and orange groves
becoming something unrecognizable to those who knew it even a half
century earlier. It is the story of a family with its fingers in the
seminal events of a city's history--the rise and fall of institutions,
neighborhoods, citizens, of the very land itself, constantly threatened
by the people who call themselves its stewards.
