Bestseller Alan Brennert's spellbinding story about a family of dreamers
and their lives within the legendary Palisades Amusement Park
Growing up in the 1930s, there is no more magical place than Palisades
Amusement Park in New Jersey--especially for seven-year-old Antoinette,
who horrifies her mother by insisting on the unladylike nickname Toni,
and her brother, Jack. Toni helps her parents, Eddie and Adele Stopka,
at the stand where they sell homemade French fries amid the roar of the
Cyclone roller coaster. There is also the lure of the world's biggest
salt-water pool, complete with divers whose astonishing stunts inspire
Toni, despite her mother's insistence that girls can't be high divers.
But a family of dreamers doesn't always share the same dreams, and then
the world intrudes: There's the Great Depression, and Pearl Harbor,
which hits home in ways that will split the family apart; and perils
like fire and race riots in the park. Both Eddie and Jack face the
dangers of war, while Adele has ambitions of her own--and Toni is
determined to take on a very different kind of danger in impossible
feats as a high diver. Yet they are all drawn back to each other--and to
Palisades Park--until the park closes forever in 1971.
Evocative and moving, with the trademark brilliance at transforming
historical events into irresistible fiction that made Alan Brennert's
Moloka'i and Honolulu into reading group favorites, Palisades Park
takes us back to a time when life seemed simpler--except, of course, it
wasn't.
