As elegant as the Sacramento residence she operates, Isabelle Labrie keeps her past concealed, like the treasure she hides under the Golden Hotel. It’s 1853, the heyday of the California Gold Rush. Isabelle is full of hope, staking her claim on the city’s refined clientele and her future on a sweetheart’s promise to marry her when he returns from the gold fields. Then, unexpected guests—fugitive slaves seeking safe passage to the North—force her to confront her past and reconsider her path.
While Isabelle learns to trust God’s provisions, a law student in Virginia must confront his father’s cruelty and rescue a young slave from his family’s tobacco plantation. As the two escape to freedom, and Isabelle risks everything to harbor runaway slaves, the past and present are set on an inevitable collision course—one that reveals hidden treasures of the heart.
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Summary
Book Title: Beneath a Golden Veil
Book Author: Melanie Dobson
What do you like about this book:
"Each of us has a natural right-from God- to defend his person, his liberty and his property."
The elegant Isabelle Labrie has experienced life on both sides of liberty, maintaining her comfortable lifestyle as a co-owner of the esteemed Golden Hotel, situated in the midst of Sacramento, California during the height of the infamous Gold Rush; her past but a distant memory, but a constant fear; her future hopeful, but infinitely precarious. Isabelle covertly uses her good fortune to aid those who are less fortunate, especially those desperately fighting against the nearly impenetrable chains of slavery.
Alden Payne is an aspiring Harvard law student, until his cruel father crosses the line of civility and commits a heinous act. Fleeing the East Coast with a young Negro boy, Alden fights his way to California, where the state slavery laws are progressive but murky, and where Alden has been promised gainful employment. When Alden's path happens to cross that of the lovely Isabelle Labrie; his life, her life and the life of the young boy Alden is trying to free, enter into a battle for freedom that none of them ever imagined could have existed.
Liberty; a sacred ideal for those who don't have it, and especially precious for those who fear that it may simply be a mirage that will one day disappear. "Beneath a Golden Veil" gifts its readers with glimpses of the legacy that brave Americans fought for; earning "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" for all men and women, regardless of their heritage or skin color, for truly "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty".
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