The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Susan Jane Gilman
About this listen
A clever and complex woman builds an ice cream empire after immigrating from Russia in this stunning novel of power, Prohibition, and performance set against the backdrop of early 20th century America
In 1913, little Malka Treynovsky flees Russia with her family. Bedazzled by tales of gold and movie stardom, she tricks them into buying tickets for America. Yet no sooner do they land on the squalid Lower East Side of Manhattan, than Malka is crippled and abandoned in the street.
Taken in by a tough-loving Italian ices peddler, she manages to survive through cunning and inventiveness. As she learns the secrets of his trade, she begins to shape her own destiny. She falls in love with a gorgeous, illiterate radical named Albert, and they set off across America in an ice cream truck. Slowly, she transforms herself into Lillian Dunkle, "The Ice Cream Queen" - doyenne of an empire of ice cream franchises and a celebrated television personality.
Lillian's rise to fame and fortune spans 70 years and is inextricably linked to the course of American history itself, from Prohibition to the disco days of Studio 54. Yet Lillian Dunkle is nothing like the whimsical motherly persona she crafts for herself in the media. Conniving, profane, and irreverent, she is a supremely complex woman who prefers a good stiff drink to an ice cream cone. And when her past begins to catch up with her, everything she has spent her life building is at stake.
©2014 Susan Jane Gilman (P)2014 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"[A] standout travel memoir...Gilman's descriptions of their trials and tribulations crackle with wit." (Booklist)
"This shrewd and lively novel tells us about those chasms between public success and private truths that make up so much of American life. The energetic narrator, the ice cream queen, is a confidence-woman, and her darkly comic story about life in the big city and in the media spotlight will give readers chills." (Charles Baxter, author of The Soul Thief)
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Award-winning journalist Elyse Singleton delivers what Essence calls “a gem - the perfect book to curl up with.”
Best friends Lilian and Myraleen, two African American women from rural Mississippi, travel to Europe during World War II to act as members of the Women’s Army Corps. During this time of segregation and destruction, both women discover love and heartbreak, triumph and defeat.
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A Breath of Fresh Air
- By Adina Andreu on 07-19-12
By: Elyse Singleton
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The Baker's Daughter
- By: Sarah McCoy
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1945, Elsie Schmidt is a naive teenager, as eager for her first sip of champagne as she is for her first kiss. She and her family have been protected from the worst of the terror and desperation overtaking her country by a high-ranking Nazi who wishes to marry her. So when an escaped Jewish boy arrives on Elsie’s doorstep in the dead of night on Christmas Eve, Elsie understands that opening the door would put all she loves in danger.
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great story
- By Stevon on 03-15-15
By: Sarah McCoy
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Gathering of Waters
- By: Bernice L. McFadden
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Gathering of Waters is a deeply engrossing tale narrated by the town of Money, Mississippi - a site both significant and infamous in our collective story as a nation. Money is personified in this haunting story, which chronicles its troubled history following the arrival of the Hilson and Bryant families. Tass Hilson and Emmett Till were young and in love when Emmett was brutally murdered in 1955. Anxious to escape the town, Tass marries Maximillian May and relocates to Detroit
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Loved it!!
- By Naima on 07-26-16
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Caramelo
- By: Sandra Cisneros
- Narrated by: Sandra Cisneros
- Length: 15 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Lala Reyes’ grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl-makers. The striped (caramelo) is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala’s possession. The novel opens with the Reyes’ annual car trip - a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels - from Chicago to “the other side”, Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family’s stories, separating the truth from the “healthy lies” that have ricocheted from one generation to the next.
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Love, family, history, and fantasy, Caramelo
- By Michele on 08-07-20
By: Sandra Cisneros
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Memphis
- A Novel
- By: Tara M. Stringfellow
- Narrated by: Karen Murray, Adenrele Ojo, Tara Stringfellow
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected.
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Awful narrator
- By Rachael edwards on 06-07-22
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The Widow of Wall Street
- A Novel
- By: Randy Susan Meyers
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett
- Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Phoebe has loved Jake Pierce since childhood, and that love continues without hesitation while she watches him create a financial dynasty. But when Phoebe learns that her husband's triumphs are the result of an elaborate Ponzi scheme, her world unravels. Lies underpin her life and marriage. And as Jake's crime is uncovered, the world obsesses over her. Did she know her gilded life was fabricated by fraud?
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Here's a Miracle: Sympathy for Ruth Madoff
- By Godwillen on 05-24-17
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Rush Home Road
- By: Lori Lansens
- Narrated by: Ruby Dee
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Abridged
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When a 70-year-old woman finds a five-year-old girl abandoned on her doorstep, she is thrust into a sorrowful past that can only be conquered with the help of the girl who opened her memory - the very girl she is trying to save. This first novel, according to author Jacquelyn Mitchard, is one of "exquisite power, honesty, and conviction...quite nearly without flaws."
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filthy language and violent content
- By Anna on 12-16-11
By: Lori Lansens
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Kiss Carlo
- By: Adriana Trigiani
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 16 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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It's 1949, and South Philadelphia bursts with opportunity during the postwar boom. The Palazzini Cab Company & Western Union Telegraph Office, owned and operated by Dominic Palazzini and his three sons, is flourishing: Business is good, and they're surrounded by sympathetic wives and daughters-in-law, with grandchildren on the way. But a decades-long feud that split Dominic and his brother, Mike, and their once-close families sets the stage for a rematch.
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Wow!!
- By MCMAK on 07-16-17
By: Adriana Trigiani
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Up from Orchard Street
- By: Eleanor Widmer
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 15 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Three generations of Roths live together in a crowded tenement flat. Long-widowed Manya is the family's head and its heart. But Manya is no soft touch, except, perhaps, where her granddaughter Elka is concerned. Precocious Elka is her closest companion and confidante. Through Elka's eyes we come to know the fascinating characters who move in and out of the Roths' lives.
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Tenement Life From a Child's Point of View
- By Sara on 08-10-14
By: Eleanor Widmer
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Orphan Number Eight
- A Novel
- By: Kim van Alkemade
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt, Ginny Auer
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In 1919, Rachel Rabinowitz is a vivacious four-year-old living with her family in a crowded tenement on New York City's Lower East Side. When tragedy strikes, Rachel is separated from her brother, Sam, and sent to a Jewish orphanage where Dr. Mildred Solomon is conducting medical research. Subjected to X-ray treatments that leave her disfigured, Rachel suffers years of cruel harassment from the other orphans.
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Stopped after a few hours
- By Tamara on 01-03-20
By: Kim van Alkemade
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Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
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The Penny
- A Novel
- By: Joyce Meyer, Deborah Bedford
- Narrated by: Emily Janice Card
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Jenny Blake has a theory about life: big decisions often don't amount to much, but little decisions sometimes transform everything. Her theory proves true the summer she's 14, when she makes the decision to pick up a penny embedded in asphalt and consequently ends up stopping a robbery, getting a job, and meeting someone who changes her life forever: Miss Shaw.
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Absoultly wonderful
- By Debbie on 08-05-07
By: Joyce Meyer, and others
What listeners say about The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Linda
- 12-02-14
Fabulous Story, Questionable Narrator
What do you think the narrator could have done better?
Hired someone else to do the narration. Not all authors should narrate their own books. It took a lot for me to get past her voice. There was little difference between the characters' voices and it was clear she was not a skilled narrator. The story, however, was fabulous.
Any additional comments?
This story was excellent. It was not the story I was expecting from the cover. The cover suggests a more "girlish" story line, but I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of the characters and the story itself. I would most definitely recommend the book. I eventually got used to the narrator, but I have to admit I almost returned the book after the first few chapters and would have had I not become so interested in the story.
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14 people found this helpful
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- F. Newsom
- 09-01-18
Interesting
This story is very interesting historically, but was difficult for me because of the negative tone throughout.
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- Lee
- 07-09-23
It dragged on too long.
I felt this book didn’t have a dynamic component to it, and the story line just dragged for me.
I think the premise of the book is good, for me it lacked in delivery.
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- shirldog
- 04-22-18
Entertain ing as well as informative.
Loved this as an audio especially, very well researched to give a flavor for the times.
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- Sheila Silver Halet
- 09-08-18
wonderful story A pleasure to listen
just loved story kept me looking forward to find out what will be the end
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- SandyC
- 04-19-18
Ice cream queen is not sweet
This book was okay. There were some good historical references and you learn d a little bit about immigration and people’s struggles. But overall the main character is not sympathetic despite what she went through. And you really do not care what happens to her. There are a lot of irritating or inconsistencies to the story so it isn’t satisfying much either. I was glad to be done with it. So sue me, darlings! Lol
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- Steve
- 12-13-19
Enjoyable
From the early years in poverty to later years in wealth, she retained a sense of humor. Very enjoyable book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Keith Walters
- 05-08-18
Narrator doesn’t fit
Great book and the narrator (author) does a fine job. But, it would have been so much better w an older voice doing the narration. Perhaps the author is like the main character?
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- Christina
- 05-11-18
I recommended it after the first chapter
I absolutely love it. I want more Lillian Dunkel! I love how the story weaved between past and present for Lillian. The story geniusly wrapped itself around real life events in our history.
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- Pamela McLaughlin
- 04-13-18
Meh...
Engaging story that kept me listening. Unfortunately I struggled between the overuse of the words “utterly” and “darlings” unsure of whether it was the writing skill or display of the character. Either way, it made me cringe every time I heard it.
If not for the story line, I might have stopped listening.
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