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St. Martin's Press
November 2013
On Sale: October 29, 2013
432 pages
ISBN: 0312643721
EAN: 9780312643720
Kindle: B008RLTW9O
Hardcover / e-Book
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Women's Fiction Contemporary
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 Jerseyβespecially 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 worldβs 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 ownβand 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 otherβand to Palisades Parkβuntil the park closes forever in 1971. Evocative and moving, with the trademark brilliance at transforming historical events into irresistible fiction that made Alan Brennertβs Moloka'i and Honolulu into reading group favorites, Palisades Park takes us back to a time when life seemed simplerβexcept, of course, it wasn't
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