The year is 2008, the place California. Vic Mahler, famous for having inspired cult followers in the seventies, serves time on death row, now facing a countdown of ten days. For years, his daughter, Lana, has been in hiding. Meanwhile, her friend Rose, a lawyer, is determined to bring the two together.
When Rose succeeds in tracking down Lana at a California health spa, the two friends must negotiate land mines of memory in order to find their future. In sharp episodes infused with pathos and wit, Edie Meidav brings her acclaimed insight and poetry to the hope of friendship, parenthood, dystopia, and the legacy of the seventies. Lola, California speaks to our contemporary crisis of faith, asking: Can we survive too much choice?
"[A] gorgeous, audacious novel . . . Meidav's prose is writerly: exact yet maximalist, prodigiously lyrical . . . The opposite of a page turner in the best way, the novel prompts us to linger, re-read, flip back, and figure the damned thing out . . . Lola, California is a startling novel, as prodigiously smart as it is technically proficient. Her characters may be narcissistic zeligs, but Meidav i
Anne Trubek, The Daily Beast
"A decades-old murder in New Age-inflected Berkeley forces a reunion between two high-school best friends in Edie Meidav's textured, disquieting third novel. Lola, California plumbs the rise and fall of a friendship, finding its terrifying resonance for the adults it produced."
Ellen Wernecke, The AV Club
"In the tightly written Lola, California, Edie Meidav explores the concept of personal choice through the story of a polemical scientist/author, his Feminist-theorist wife, their daughter, and the daughter's best friend . . . But it's Meidav's unusual prose that is the star of this book. Her style is sculptural; she chips away at the text, dispensing with unnecessary words and punctuation, making
