Having grown up down the road from this infamous amusement
park in
New Jersey, I couldn't wait to read PALISADES PARK by Alan
Brennert. In
Alan's third novel, PALISADES PARK, He writes, in the
Author's Notes,
"This novel is a love letter to a cherished part of my
childhood." It is a love
letter, a delightful love story of wondrous times and
places, and of days
gone by. I could smell the French fries with malt vinegar
as I was reading
this wonderful story and I was instantly sent back to the
late sixties early
seventies and summers in New Jersey. I am still craving
cotton candy and
a hot dog.
This is an interesting story about Eddie Stopka who grew up
in the
Ironbound section of Newark and went to Palisades Park every
summer
with his mother and father. The Stopkas are a family who
live, dream
and suffer. Each one of them brings something important to
the story. You
will meet and get to know very well, Eddie, Adele, Toni, and
Jack Stopka.
Throughout the story, the park anchors them and allows them
to dream
bigger dreams. As decades pass, they live through a
Depression, Pearl
Harbor, World War II, The Korean War, and the Civil Rights
movement. The
scenes at Palisades Park when blacks attempt to swim in the
all white salt
water pool are really powerful. The fires and other
disasters the park
suffers will have you holding your breath while you
furiously flip the pages.
Toni is a strong willed, beautiful, daredevil diver who
repeatedly had to
make tough life decisions. She and her dad are the most
engaging
characters for me. For almost a hundred years the park was
the place to
be seen until it was torn down in 1973. The park is long
gone and now all
that sits there are high rise condominiums.
Reading about the history of Palisades Park was a learning
experience for
me even though I lived so close to the park. I really
enjoyed reading
PALISADES PARK. I thought about what it was like to feel
discrimination in
those early years and how sad it would have been to feel so
hated.
Rationing...saving bacon fat to help the war effort and
actually just living
through that particular war era when Americans worked so
hard to help the
men on the front.
Alan's story truly is a love letter to a wonderful park that
gave so many people the best memories of their lives during
a time when
our country was struggling with war and depression. Between
Alan's
memories and his research he hit the history and the area,
spot on. Once I
started reading, I couldn't stop. PALISADES PARK held my
interest from
the first page until the very last one.
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
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