“The park slumbers through the long winter, weighed down by ice and snow, dreaming of spring…..as it drowses beneath its quilt of snow, it dreams of all the people who flocked to its midways: men, women and especially children, the joy the park brought them, the laughter that was like oxygen for the park, which breathed it in as it floated up from the Cyclone, the Funhouse, the Wild Mouse, the Carousel.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (JAN 25, 2014)

Palisades Park is no roller coaster ride of a novel, rather it is a well written love letter to a “cherished part of the author’s childhood.” (author’s quote). This is a fascinating historical fiction, written with love to a magical place and era long gone.

Located high atop the New Jersey Palisades’ cliffs, within the boroughs of Cliffside Park and Fort Lee, once stood the home of the famous Cyclone roller coaster, the Tunnel of Love and the world’s largest salt water pool. The place was called Palisades Amusement Park and even today, over thirty years after it closed its gates, the Park is still warmly remembered, with nostalgia, by many, many people. This novel strikes a particular chord with me as I was born and raised in Atlantic City, NJ, (way before the casinos marred the beauty of the town, and the majestic, beautifully designed hotels were torn down to make room for tacky casino architecture). I was a regular at Steel Pier and Million Dollar Pier and would ride the “rides” even when I was in college.

The protagonist of this tale is the Park itself, inhabiting 30 acres across the Hudson River from New York City. The glue holding the storyline together is a carnie family, the Stopkas. Eddie Stopka ran away from home in his teens, during the Great Depression and Prohibition. He rode the rails until he got a job at Palisades Park “sweeping up.” It was here where Eddie meets Adele Worth who works at a root beer concession. He is attracted to her because she is beautiful and he is also amused by her “pitch.” She would call, “Root beer, ice-cold root beer! Only legal beer in the Park! Not as much fun as malt, but just as delicious and twice as foamy! C’mon, lift a glass to Carrie Nation!!”

Adele’s father used to be a well known film director in Fort Lee, NJ. His company was called Worth While Pictures. Eventually the film industry relocates to Hollywood, thus ending his career in the movies. He remains bitter about this change for the rest of his life and drinks heavily as a result. Adele was just 6 months old when she “acted” in her first film, “Babes in Arms.” As a pre-teen she meets big stars like Douglas Fairbanks and silent film actress Blanche Sweet. The lovely Adele is crowned Miss Bergen County. She comes to work at Palisades hoping to be noticed by anyone who can help her get a job in the film industry. And why not? “Everyone” visits Palisades Park! She holds on to her dream of being a movie star all her life.

Eddie and Adele eventually marry and their children Antoinette, a tomboy, fantasizes about being a great diver, like the daredevil she sees at the park who jumps from a 90-foot tower into a water tank six feet deep. She insists, to her mother’s dismay, that she be called Toni and is definitely more into swimming and trying to climb the Palisades than in playing with dolls. Her younger brother Jack has a real knack for drawing and a love of action comic book characters. Eventually, when their parents buy a “joint,” (a carny concession), the children work there. This is their real home, more so than the house where they live in Edgewater, NJ.

In 1912, the park added a salt-water swimming pool. It is filled by pumping water from the saline Hudson River, 200 feet below. This pool, 400 by 600 feet in surface area, is billed as the largest salt-water wave pool in the nation. Behind the water falls are huge pontoons that rise up and down as they rotate, creating a one-foot wave in the pool. This pool  eventually plays a big role in Toni’s life.

The carnival “freaks” “Jolly Irene, the Fattest Woman In The World,” “Susi, The Elephant-Skinned Girl,” “Charles Phelan, Strong Man,” “Victor-Victoria – Half Man, Half Woman,” “Hoppe The Frog Boy,” etc., are not freaks to the children or their parents, they are just friends and colleagues on the midway. Here there is an aura of camaraderie. Vendors help each other through fire, sickness, poverty and loss. Annually the Rosenthal brothers, who own the park, add new rides. They also construct a 24-foot high, one million watt marquee advertising Palisades Park.

The park’s reputation and attendance continues to grow throughout the 1950s and 1960s, largely due to saturation advertising and the continued success of the park’s music pavilion and the Caisson bar. In addition, behind the Palisade Park music stage lay the park’s worst-kept secret: a hole in the fence used by local children to sneak into the park without paying admission. Despite the fact that the Rosenthal brothers know all about this breach, it is purposely left unrepaired.

Palisades Park spans several decades, 1922-1971 (the closing of the park). We experience, through the author’s writing and impeccable research, the evolution of the Park. Some of the well-incorporated historical details include: The Great Depression, President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, the peacetime draft, big band music, Hitler, Pearl Harbor, Mafia hits, racial discrimination, the Korean War, and the 1960’s, which brought a major change to American culture. The reader also learns about the Park’s history which runs parallel to world history. There were major events here which effected both the families who worked at Palisades and those who came to be entertained. A few devastating fires, the bane of amusement parks everywhere, resulted in extraordinary damage, including terrible injuries and, sometimes, death. The resulting loss of property caused those who owned concessions to rebuild or go to work elsewhere, traveling the carnie circuit.

Alan Brennert magically brings to life a way of life. The character of Palisades Park in all its moods, and the people, especially the engaging Stopkas, are vividly portrayed in this enjoyable novel.

My “however moment,” is this – although this is a very entertaining read, the characters are not complex at all. There is nothing in their life stories which has not been written about before. The novelty is the Park itself and the view of history which the author brings to the story. Yet I found myself satisfied, even through these shortcomings, because of other aspects, written about above, which makes this a hard to put down book.

I think the character of Park owner Irving Rosenthal sums things up when he says,

“A place like this – it’s like a living thing, the way people interact with it, how they think of it. For kids like you who grew up around here, it’s always been a part of your lives – it’s personal. Sell it to someone like Walt Disney, and it’s no longer the same park. I want it to be the same, to go one living after I’m gone. We’re at the top of our game now. Palisades has never been more popular, more famous. What’s wrong with wanting that to go on? Nobody wants summer to end.”

Palisades finally closed its doors on September 12, 1971 to make room for high rise condominiums but the memories live on.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 203 readers
PUBLISHER:	St. Martin’s Griffin (October 29, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alan Brennert
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Wikipedia page on Palisades Amusement Park
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Honolulu Moloka’i And this gator-themed fictional amusement park: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Bibliography:

• Kindred Spirits (1984)
• Time and Chance (1990)
• Her Pilgrim Soul and Other Stories (1990)
• Moloka’i (2003)
• Honolulu (2009)
• Palisades Park (April 2013)

“Liz and I might even have paused to remark on how lucky we were, as we were inclined to do, but at no point would we have considered the possibility that we’d dodged a bullet that day, that we’d come this close to our lives veering permanently off course. That’s the kind of thing you see only in hindsight.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAY 18, 2011)

It’s rare that I start a book that is such a page-turner that I almost have a panic attack if I have to put it down. Long Drive Home by Will Allison is just such a book. It starts with a bang and the explosives just continue. It’s not that the book is a thriller, per se, though there is that element to the novel. It is just that Will Allison is a born story-teller and he gets the reader in his grips from the first paragraph. And he does not let go.

Glen Bauer is a married father with a six year-old daughter named Sara. He is driving Sara in his car when he sees a police officer go through a red light. He gives the cop the finger and thinks all is over. However, there is a tough guy in front of Glen who thinks that the finger was intended for him.  The tough guy stops his car, comes over to Glen and makes sure that Glen can see the gun protruding from inside his jacket. He demands an apology and, by God, he gets it. Glen is thoroughly furious now. His day has been ruined and he’s not such a calm driver to begin with. He leaves this scene only to be cut off through three lanes of traffic by a teenager speeding along in a Jaguar. Glen is not a happy camper. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey, a quiet little burb and things like this just don’t happen to him. He thinks he has seen the last of the Jaguar but he’s wrong. It makes a u-turn and heads back towards Glen just as Glen is about to turn into his driveway. Glen decides to mess with the Jaguar driver – he’s furious. He turns his wheels to get in the same lane as the driver as if to play chicken and at the last minute, pulls away. Meanwhile, however, the driver of the Jaguar loses control of his car and hits a huge Sycamore tree, turning the vehicle over and over. Jamal, the sixteen year-old driver of the Jaguar is dead.

Now Glen is in a moral dilemma. If he tells the truth, he could be arrested as an accomplice to a killing. He also realizes that he put his six-year old daughter, Sara, at risk by his shenanigans. He decides to lie about what happened and say that he was just pulling into his driveway when Jamal lost control of his car. The police investigate and one very perspicacious detective, Rizzo, thinks that Glen is hiding something. Also, the evidence contradicts Glen’s story. His tire tracks are several feet beyond his driveway. If, as he says, he was pulling into his driveway, the tracks should end before his driveway starts. Rizzo is on Glen like white on snow.

As Glen begins to tell one lie after another, or omit one fact or another, in order to cover up what happened, his life starts to unravel. His marriage begins to crumble in the wake of fear – fear of litigation or imprisonment, and his wife’s sense that Glen is not telling the truth. Glen’s moral dilemmas get worse and worse. In fact, he realizes that Sara knows the truth and he wants to keep her as far away from Detective Rizzo as possible. He thinks he can get away with things but the situation keeps getting more and more out of hand. Glen also thinks that if certain situations had not occurred prior to Jamal’s accident, he never would have acted like he did. He becomes obsessed with finding someone or something to blame for Jamal’s death other than himself.

Jamal’s mother hires a lawyer in consideration of a wrongful death suit, Rizzo won’t get off Glen’s tail and Sara inadvertently speaks to Jamal’s mother about the accident. Glen and his wife separate, ostensibly to keep their assets separate, but in reality their marriage is becoming a sham.

The novel is told in first person by Glen and also as a letter he is composing for his daughter, Sara, to give to her when she is eighteen. It would have been nice if there had been more of the letter included in the novel as the letter really gets into Glen’s head and his rationalizations and truths regarding the accident.

This book is a moral thriller and a good look at today’s society. What constitutes a lie versus a lie of omission? Where does truth end and lying begin. When is it right to lie and when does lying take its toll on others’ greater freedoms. Allison examines all these issues in a book you won’t soon forget. Don’t plan on doing anything else once you start this novel. If you’re like me, you’ll give up eating and sleeping until it’s finished.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 22 readers
PUBLISHER:	Free Press; Original edition (May 17, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Will Allison
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another if you like this one: Aftermath by Brian Shawyer

Bibliography:

• What You Have Left (2007)
• Long Drive Home (May 2011)

” …there’s nobody less salvageable than a ruined good boy.”

Book Review:

Review by Helen Ditouras  (OCT 15, 2010)

“Tender” and “noble” are two words I have never used to describe a Roth character. In fact, Roth’s usual suspects are razor sharp with a mean streak of self-loathing to befit the most unlikable anti-heroes of the American literary canon. Not to mention, most of his characters are so self-obsessed and entrenched in complicated sexual proclivities that they seldom do the right thing. And much to the chagrin of my feminist friends, I’m amused, if not seduced, by these delinquent male protagonists, and look forward to their self-deprecating demise each and every time I encounter them.

Which is precisely why my love for Eugene “Bucky” Cantor bemuses me in a way I can’t describe. Cantor, the leading man in Roth’s latest novel Nemesis, is so decent, so likable in a non-Rothian way, that if you’re a stalwart fan of Alexander Portnoy or David Kepesh, two of the most deliciously depraved characters to ever grace Roth’s fiction, then Bucky Cantor materializes like Mother Theresa. And yet never before have I ached for such a character – identified with such a man whose nobility and innocence would have previously escaped me.

Is it the setting of this novel, 1944 wartime Newark, that makes the emergence of a character like Cantor so salient, if not, believable? Or, is it the raging outbreak of polio in Jewish Weequahic that brings all of these elements together? A child orphaned by the death of his mother upon giving birth, abandoned by his charlatan of a father, Bucky Cantor is saved by his wholesome grandparents who raise him with dignity and unmitigated devotion. Schooled by his grandfather – a kind, but indubitably, man’s man, Cantor appears in the first chapter of Roth’s novel as a hero of sorts. Especially to the children of Chancellor Avenue School, who worship Bucky as their beloved playground director during the summer of the polio outbreak. Unhinged by his inability to serve in the army due to his compromised eyesight, Cantor allots his time and affection to the Jewish children of Weequahic who compete for his love and approval. From standing up to a group of anti-Semitic Italian hooligans on the playground, to modeling his outstanding athletic prowess, Bucky Cantor is more than the local victor of summertime Newark – he becomes the center of these children’s lives. So when polio hits the Chancellor playground and ruthlessly stakes out the fates of these children, so begins the slow and agonizing decline of Roth’s most affable frontrunner.

What strikes me as sheer genius on the part of Roth, is the allegorical references to Europe’s Shoah that line the pages of this heartfelt narrative. Even while Roth makes references to Nazi-occupied Europe and the ongoing war, he is quick to evade any talk of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Instead, he redirects the readers to Pearl Harbor, or the calamity of polio, which like the Holocaust, swiftly and mercilessly wipes out the Jews of Newark. That Cantor is overwhelmingly haunted, page after page, with crippling doses of survivor’s guilt, only makes this metaphorical imagery more deliberate and nuanced. Like many survivors, Cantor rails against the wrath of God, who does little to stop the slaughter of Newark’s children. And his disbelief of God, which appears early on in the novel, intensifies as the narrative progresses, leaving Bucky more desolate, more pathetic, than possibly imaginable.

So, who was Bucky Cantor’s nemesis? Was it the rampant Anti-Semitism of the 1940s – so disproportionate in its ugliness – that forced Cantor to always “stand up for himself as a man and to stand up for himself as a Jew?” Or was Cantor’s unconditional allegiance to patriarchy the Achilles’ heel that forced him to view his own weakness as feminized and unacceptable. I would suggest, his penultimate nemesis was the polio outbreak of the 40s.

Making his indomitable nemesis, of course, God.

In all of this uncertainty lies the unadulterated beauty of Roth’s new novel – the resounding message that despite life’s malevolent blows, goodness does abound. And in the face of mankind’s cynicism, once in a great while, we are blessed to make the acquaintance of people like Bucky Cantor.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 61 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Helen Ditouras
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	The Philip Roth SocietyWikipedia page on Philip Roth
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Plot Against America Indignation Exit Ghost Everyman

Bibliography:

• Goodbye, Columbus: Novella and five stories (1959)
• Letting Go (1962)
• When She Was Good (1967)
• Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
• Our Gang (Starring Tricky and His Friends) (1971)
• The Great American Novel (1973)
• My Life as a Man (1974)
• Deception (1986)
• The Conversion of the Jews (1993)
• Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993)**
• Sabbath’s Theater (1995)
• The Plot Against America (September 2004) **
• Everyman (April 2006)
• Indignation (September 2008)
• The Humbling (November 2009)
• Nemesis (October 2010)

** Philip Roth appears in novel

Zuckerman Novels:

• The Ghostwriter (1979)
• Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
• The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
• The Prague Ogry (1985)
• The Counterlife (1985)
• American Pastoral (1997)
• I Married a Communist (1998)
• The Human Stain (2000)
• Exit Ghost (October 2007)
• The Humbling (November 2009)
• Nemesis (October 2010)

David Kapesh Novels:

• The Breast (1973)
• The Professor of Desire (1977)
• The Dying Animal (2001)

Nonfiction:

• Reading Myself and Others (1975)
• The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988)
• Patrimony: A True Story (1990)
• Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (2001)

E-Book Study Guide:

• Study Guide for Goodbye, Columbus (2002)
• Study Guide for The Conversion of the Jews (2003)

Movies from books:

• Goodbye, Columbus (1969)
• Portnoy’s Complaint (VHS only) (1972)
• The Human Stain (July 2004)

“Who’s there?”

Suddenly there were other people in the room. A man with a camera. Another with what looked like a boom mike. And the female with a familiar voice, a stunning woman with chestnut brown hair and a business suit.

“Wendy Tynes, NTC News. Why are you here Dan?”

I opened my mouth, nothing came out. I recognized the woman from the TV newsmagazine…

“Why have you been conversing online in a sexual manner with a thirteen-year old girl, Dan? We have your communications with her.”
…the one that sets up and catches pedophiles on camera for all the world to see.

“Are you here to have sex with a thirteen-year-old girl?”

The truth of what was going on there hit me, freezing my bones. Other people flooded the room. Producers maybe. Another cameraman. Two cops. The cameras came in closer. The lights got brighter. Beads of sweat popped up on my brow. I started to stammer, started to deny.

But it was over.

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale (MAR 23, 2010)

Dan Mercer’s life very quickly changes for the worst as TV newswoman Wendy Tynes catches him going to a meeting with a thirteen-year old girl she pretends to be to lore pedophiles like she thinks Dan is into her trap. Dan is vehement in his innocence and as the reader knows, he thought he was going to help a young girl not to have sex with her. However, in this case, despite the evidence against him, Wendy starts to have some doubt, especially when Dan’s ex-wife and her husband seem so willing to defend him. Dan’s slick lawyer is able to use some legal technicalities to get Dan off from the crimes charged against him, but the community still feels Dan is guilty and he is forced to go into hiding.

At around the same time, 17-year old Haley McWaid a smart, athletic and apparently happy teenager does not return home. Very little is found about her disappearance until evidence points to Dan Mercer when Haley’s phone is found in Dan’s hotel room months after Haley’s disappearance. The phone is found right after Wendy Tynes sees Dan murdered by the father of a child who also claims Dan abused him. Although Dan’s dead body is not found, the police are able to find Dan’s hotel room with the missing phone under his bed.

Wendy’s uncertainty of Dan’s guilt is lessened once Haley McWaid’s cell phone is found in Dan’s room. However during her investigations of Dan’s background, she does talk to some of Dan’s former friends including his Princeton college roommates. Wendy discovers that Dan had lived in a suite with 5 other people all of whom have fallen on hard times, with most having potentially unfounded but damaging claims against them. These unusual circumstances, along with the possible guilt of ruining an innocent man, make Wendy look further to see if Dan is really the guilty pedophile he seems to be.

Caught is told primarily in the third person perspective usually from the perspective of Wendy Tynes. However, the book does start in the first person as Coben gives the reader a chance to see into the mind of Dan Mercer before he is caught by Wendy Tynes. Mercer comes across as someone who truly cares about the youth he spends most of his time helping, adding, at least to the reader, more doubt about Dan’s guilt.

Caught is Harlan Coben’s latest standalone book, the first since Hold Tight (2008) after last year’s latest Myron Bolitar book, Long Lost. As typical of Coben’s books, most of the action in this book takes place in northern New Jersey near where he grew up and not too far from where Coben now lives.

As I mentioned in the Long Lost review, I’ve read all of Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar books, but only one prior non-series book, Tell No One. I thought that Tell No One was better than any of the Bolitar books and was really looking forward to Caught. Although at first, I thought Caught was even better than Tell No One, that feeling did not last throughout the book and by the end although I was not disappointed, I did not think it held up as well. Caught certainly has the great suspense and twists but I was less surprised at the end than I thought I would be. This is not to say that the book was not good or that the ending easily determined, just that a twist was expected. Overall, though, this was a very good book and one that keeps you interested from the beginning to the end.

One thing that is not very prevalent in Harlan Coben’s standalone books is the humor that is a key part of the Myron Bolitar series. Of course Caught is a serious book that also addresses serious issues about missing children and child molesters so the chance for humor is limited. However, look for a friend of Myron Bolitar who  is fun and enjoyable to make a cameo appearance.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 272 readers
PUBLISHER:	Dutton Adult (March 23, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Harlan CobenWikipedia on Harlan Coben
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Play Dead From the Myron Bolitar series: Long Lost Live Wire

Bibliography:

• Play Dead (1990)
• Miracle Cure (1991)
• Tell No One (2001)
• Gone for Good (2002)
• No Second Chance (2003)
• Just One Look (2004)
• The Innocent (2005)
• The Woods (2007)
• Hold Tight (2008)
• Caught (2010)
• Stay Close (2012)
• Six Years (March 2013)

Myron Bolitar Series:

• Deal Breaker (1995)
• Drop Shot (1996)
• Fade Away (1996) /
• Back Spin (1997)
• One False Move (1998)
• The Final Detail (1999)
• Darkest Fear (2000)
• Promise Me (2006)
• Long Lost (2009)
• Live Wire (2011)

Mickey Bolitar (young adult series)

• Shelter (2011)
• Seconds Away (2012)

Movies from books:

• Tell No One (2006; 2009 on DVD)

“This is something about himself that Alec still doesn’t know: how much he was wanted, how difficult it was to have him. And during some moments of adolescent rebellion, and again during the wars over his dropping out of Hampshire, when he would scream that he wished he’d never been born, Elaine would grab his flailing arms, hold him still, and say, You can never say that. That’s the one thing you are never allowed to say.

He was born at Round Hill Medical Center on July 4, 1985, nine fifteen at night. As we held Alec for the first time, the town fireworks began to whiz and boom, celebrating 209 years of democracy in America and also, Elaine and I were certain, our son’s long-awaited arrival.”

Book Review:

Review by Sudheer Apte (FEB 5, 2010)

Just like her earlier debut novel Reproduction is the Flaw of Love, Lauren Grodstein’s new book, too, is written from the point of view of a morose male protagonist. The hero in A Friend of the Family is Peter Dizinoff, a doctor living in a very comfortable New Jersey suburb.

In the beginning of the novel we find Dizinoff unhappy and separated from his family, but we are not told why. Flipping between flashbacks, we learn that his son Alec, on whom all of his fatherly expectations are laden, has disappointed his father by dropping out of a promising school. Not only is Dizinoff worried about his son’s life and career, but he is also worried that his wife Elaine seems much more blasé about how their son will manage, content to just love him and trust that he will find his own way.

Why can’t Alec be more like their best friends’ children, two of whom went to MIT? There are plenty of bad examples on hand to beware of: the same best friends’ eldest daughter got pregnant a few years ago as a teenager, was suspected of having murdered her baby after birth, and left home for years to escape the scandal. In fact this girl, Laura, now thirty years old, is back home now, and the much younger Alec is taking an alarming interest in her.

The central dilemma of the novel is a father’s love for his son and how far he is willing to go to protect him from approaching horrors. This kind of story is tricky to write: make Peter Dizinoff too sympathetic a character, and you veer into tragic melodrama as bad things happen to an innocent person; yet if you make him too flawed, the reader is apt to stop caring what happens to him.

Grodstein does a good job balancing these tensions, although your reaction to the novel will depend on how much Dizinoff’s character repels you. The man has no empathy for others. He is quick to judge people and to interfere in his son’s life, all the while offering elaborate justifications to himself for his own actions. Always a bit off, he gradually becomes more and more socially conservative, starting to take an interest in his Jewish heritage. He desperately wants his son to talk to him but is unable to relate to him. What prevents Dizinoff from becoming a Bollywood movie dad is Grodstein’s use of the first person, so that we see his life through his eyes. He is also a somewhat unreliable narrator; gradually his perspective becomes more and more skewed, while the past and present become more and more intertwined.

What I liked about the novel was its fast pace, especially toward the end when the mystery is revealed. Grodstein’s minute observations of everyday life, and her insight into a middle-aged father’s mind, also make this novel enjoyable. With well-researched medical terminology and some excellent lines, this should make for a good feature film—I can already see Robin Williams in a white coat.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 287 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books; 1 edition (November 10, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Sudheer Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lauren Grodstein
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on Fatherhood: Captain Saturday by Robert Inman Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon

Bibliography:

• The Best of Animals: Stories (2002)
• Reproduction is the Flaw of Love (2004)
• A Friend of the Family (2009)
• The Explanation for Everything (September 2013)

“Memory is an odd thing. . . There are entire blocks of time, years, that I have but little memory of at all. . .Except for the summer before my sixth birthday. For that summer, I have almost photographic recall of the heat, the voices that surrounded me, the smells, all those incidents, particulars that took place. They changed me.”

Book Review:

Review by Danielle Bullen (SEP 13, 2009)

Looking After Pigeon transports the reader to the Jersey shore in the mid-seventies, with the precocious five-year old Pigeon as narrator and tour guide.

After their father walks out, their mother, Joan, moves Pigeon and her older siblings Robin and Dove to their uncle Edward’s house in an un-named New Jersey beach town.

“I have heard that in the sixties, they spoke of free love and equally free living. But little of it seemed to have rubbed off on our mother.” Order reigns supreme in the house. Their mother is a stickler for rules, and frequently preaches the evils of materialism. Joan gets a job at the local movie theater, determined to stay busy. Later, to the children’s surprise, she brings home a man named Cary who becomes a fixture in the house that summer.

Ten-year-old Robin becomes enchanted with a fortune-teller named Edith. He soon starts to believe that he has the gift, that he can predict the future and sets up shop alongside her, Edith marketing him as the boy wonder. Not everyone shares his enthusiasm, as other family members worry that the woman is only using Robin as a novelty to increase her profit. Robin doesn’t care and spends most days at Edith’s run-down shack.

Sixteen-year old Dove waitresses at Joe Winter’s diner. Like the bird she is named after, Dove is beautiful and delicate. She shakes up the family dynamic when she announces she’s pregnant with her boyfriend Stan’s baby. The news throws the family into a tailspin, as everyone tells Dove how to handle the situation. Complicating matters is the unusually close, flirtatious relationship Dove and her boss have, a relationship that “might make people wonder who the father of her baby is.”

Although the story takes place only thirty-some years ago, these characters occupy a completely different world. Pigeon is frequently left alone when her family goes to work, something that’s unheard of these days. She has a well-cultivated sense of independence. Although she is the youngest, Pigeon acts as a confidante to her brother and sister, who tell her about the escapades with the fortune teller and the pregnancy before any one else. For her part, Pigeon keeps these secrets with a solemnity that belies her age.

Pigeon still has moments that show her true naiveté. Towards the end of the book, she accompanies her uncle Edward into New York for a business day trip. Pigeon sneaks off and tries to find her father, who had recently sent her a postcard from Manhattan. “I did not realize the impossibility of my task–to find an apartment in New York City with no address, to find among all of the people, only my father .”

Reading this novel feels as if you are looking in on a real family instead of a fictional one. Marson’s novel expertly captures the rhythms of everyday life. Her writing flows very easily making the story move along at an effortless clip.

Looking After Pigeon is a unique coming-of-age-story. Even though the reader sees everything filtered through Pigeon’s eyes, it is just as much about Dove’s and Robin’s summer of growing older and wiser. I felt a strong attachment to all the characters and flipped the pages eagerly wanting to discover their fates. This engrossing novel has much to recommend it.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 11 readers
PUBLISHER:	Permanent Press (July 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Danielle Bullen
AMAZON PAGE:	Looking After Pigeon
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Maud Carol Markson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More coming of age novels: The Absence of Nectar by Kathy Hepinstall The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle Another mid-1970s book: American Woman by Susan Choi Another New Jersey book: The Cranberry Queen by Kathleen DeMarco

Bibliography:

• Looking After Pigeon (July 2009)