Wishlist Wednesday # 5

Wishlist Wednesday is a book blog hop hosted by Pen to paper, where we will post about one book per week that has been on our wishlist for some time, or just added (it's entirely up to you), that we can't wait to get off the wishlist and onto our wonderful shelves.

 I never heard of Alan Brennert before a couple of weeks ago, when I fell head over heels in love with the cover of his novel Moloka'i (have a look on yesterday's Teaser Tuesday) and decided right there and then that I had to read it. Moloka'i is truly a gem and I will be posting my review of it shortly.  Moloka'i led me to reading his subsequent novel Honolulu (another review in the pipeline) and taken in by his style and stories, I set out to look for other things he wrote.  And that's how I ended up with this book on my wishlist.

Palisades Park by Alan Brennert promises to be as much an enjoyable read as the previous novels. I can't wait to get my hands on this one.

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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.
Source : Goodreads.com