Customer Reviews

The Lost Legends of New Jersey

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With his knockout second novel, Reiken makes it clear that he is not a one-hit wonder. A much more complex and multidimensional book than its predecesssor, The Lost Legends once again demonstrates Reiken's uncanny ability to create characters we feel and know and remember. The most amazing thing about the novel, however, is that it simultaneously manages to depict suburban New Jersey as both mundane and magical. The author's gift is that he is capable of taking the ordinary and, while keeping it realistic, achieve a certain resonance that stems directly from the characters' varying and all-too-human points of view. In other words, the magic is not literally magic. Rather, we feel a sense of magic because at certain times we feel a character's sense of wonder and beauty rising out of the sterility of the landscape -- something like the plastic bag scene in "American Beauty." Reiken is masterful at this kind of thing and New Jersey is the perfect setting for such moments of quiet luminosity. In one scene, for instance, the main character and his sister take a nighttime bike ride across Livingston NJ under a full moon. What could easily be banal turns haunting under the glow of the moonlight -- no magic realism here, just emotionally charged childhood wonder (and sorrow). Likewise, the scene in which Anthony finds a garbage dump filled with old band instruments in the Meadowlands becomes legendary... This is a powerful, heart-wrenching book, a must read, whether or not you've ever driven the NJ Turnpike!

A phenomenal achievement. Reiken's second novel, succeeds in capturing the melancholy, and at times almost dreamlike state, of surburn life in New Jersey, circa 1980.Yet the most remarkable accomplishment in the book are its characters. Each of them, carry with them a sweetness burried in thier own confussion about themselves, which makes them wonderfully real. Through choice,the book shies away form the conventional lineal narrative used in his debut The Odd Sea. And as result those who have read his first novel might fight the transition difficult as this book uses multiple view points to show the aftermath and ripple effects of a single event. Moreover, it works brilliantly. It is a remarkable achievement and Reiken's use of emotion through subtly ties the work together between the feelings of love: lost and won.

Frederick Reiken has given us a wonderful, brilliant novel. It snuck up on me. I started reading it thinking it was a nice, coming of age in New Jersey novel, but after about 50 pages, I realized it is so much more than that. As a coming of age novel, it is wonderful. Reikien's prose is so evocative of a particular place and time (northern New Jersey, 1979-1981). But this novel is about so much more. It is about the tremendous hold the past has over us, how it keeps being repeated, in our actions and in our minds. It is about stories--the stories we tell, the stories we omit and what the listener/reader must extrapolate from beyond the boundaries of what is told. I highly recommend this book. I don't think you have to be from New Jersey, or in your thirties to appreciate what happens to Anthony Rubin, the wonderful protagonist, and his family. His parents separate after his father's affair with his best friend's mother and Anthony falls in love with the girl next door, whose father just could be in the mafia. A wonderful story, wonderfully told. I highly recommend it.

Bittersweet, in the truest sense of the word. Lost Legends Of New Jersey captures the mixture of soft reality and hard dreams, not only of growing up, but of being an adult, and still wishing. Reiken evokes suburbia so well that you can smell the wet lawns at 5AM and feel the dew on your shoes...not the suburbia which it is so fashionable to trash, but the one where it was almost safe to grow up and to dream in. By the end of the book you find yourself nodding and smiling a rueful smile. In the words of Jimmy Buffett, "Some of it's magic, and some of it's tragic..." I read it in two sittings, and was sorry when it was done.

I've been on a bit of a New Jersey tear lately, having read this book, Richard Ford's "Independence Day" and Rand Johnson's "Arcadia Falls" in a relatively short span - and find them very interesting to compare. All are excellent and feature suburban New Jersey settings which serve as a crucible for their characters' search for meaning in the midst of the mundane. But whereas Ford seems to suggest that acceptance of the world as presented is the road to salvation, both Johnson and Reiken present characters seeking to transcend their realities, Reiken's thru love and Johnson's thru the embrace of a more romantic past. The different experiences reflected in these three novels create a fascinating portrait of the suburban New Jersey experience. Try them all!

Suburban New Jersey circa 1980 is the setting for this thoughtful novel by Frederick Reiken, which looks at a family in crisis through the eyes of a Jewish teenager named Anthony Rubin. On the surface the Rubin's are a typical functional working class family. Michael Rubin is a physician and his wife Jess is a stay-at-home mom to their two teenage children Danielle and Anthony. But looks can be deceiving, and behind closed doors this family is coming apart at the seams. Michael is having an affair with Claudia, a family friend. Jess finds out and suffer a nervous breakdown and abandons her family to make a new life in Florida. Meanwhile Anthony is trying to make sense of it all while attempting to lead a normal life as a teenager. Along the way Anthony comes face-to-face with family rivalry, social conflict, sex, drugs, and what he thinks may be his first love. Although there is an underlying sadness to the theme, Reiken tells the story in a light manner which crackles with humor when appropriate and provides introspective passages when a deeper response is warranted from the reader.

I knew nothing of Frederick Reiken when I bought this book. To be honest, I bought this book only because of its title. Like the main character, Anthony Rubin, I was a teenager in the early 1980's growing up in New Jersey. I was even raised in a Jewish stepfamily, thus I felt this coming of age novel would be something I could relate to. But there was much more to this book than a few similarities to my life. The story Reiken weaves is one straight from the heart, one which captures the self-discovery and awkwardness we all face when entering adulthood. For a fresh reading experience that will leave you pondering over your past and how it has shaped your life today, open The Lost Legends of New Jersey and savor every word.

I really enjoyed Frederick Reiken's first novel "The Odd Sea." His second novel is another enjoyable family saga about suburban life in New Jersey. Again, he has created characters you feel you've known as friends, relatives, and acquaintances, just ordinary people coping with everyday life, and its many trials and tribulations. There's sex, drugs, alcohol, extramarital affairs, & coming of age peer pressures and problems. You name it, it's here in this story.

This is the story of the Rubins family that seems to be falling apart. I think the only character that really has it together is the grandfather, Max, who cherishes life, and meets the love of his life at 81 years old. Anthony Rubin, the young son, is desperately trying to find love especially with his neighbor Juliette. Jess, his mother seems to have so many psychological problems. She knows her husband is having an affair with Claudia, and just takes off for Florida. And there's Dani, the daughter. Well, I'll leave you to discover her problems. All these ordinary people seem to be wondering what to do next with their lives.

Sometimes it helps to read about other people and their family problems. It helps you forget your own. I enjoyed this novel, and I really came to care about these people. I look forward to the author's next book. Oh, and I hope you find your true "b'shert" in your life, too!

I loved this book. I loved Garp and I loved Holden but being Jewish and growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I never could truly identify with them. The beauty of Reiken's work is that the characters are so identifiable and so real. I've haven't read a book that made me feel this good since my high school reading of Catcher in the Rye in 1978 and Bruce was playing in the background.

Common, believable and utterly sympathetic characters abound in Frekerick Reiken's important second novel, "The Lost Legends of New Jersey." Aswirl in the midst of fractured relationships and adrift in lives which are incomplete and unfinished, the everday people whose stories unfold become important to us; we come not only to understand their unique anguish but to hope that they may achieve the human fulfillment and completion they so sadly, so quietly, so desperately lack. Reiken is simply masterful in making us care for his characters; ultimately, they assume near-legendary, mythical stature despite (or perhaps because of) their suburban, late twentieth-century New Jersey environment.

The novel's perspective varies through the different voices of the characters; thus, "The Lost Legends" initially appears as a series of interlocking short stories. On a different level, however, "The Lost Legends" grows in intensity as it plumbs the questions of love, loss and personal meaning through the experiences and voices of several key characters. All, however, share a foreboding sense of loss, best articulated by the protagnoist's grandfather: "Life will have woods and it will always have tenebrium [darkness]...And this is it. You look for clearings. This is what life is all about. And when they come you stay inside for as long as possible. You look for openings and clearings, in your life."

The protagonist, Anthony Rubin, exemplifieds this search for spiritual freedom and completion. Left reeling by the ruin of his parents' marriage and his mother's personal disintegration, Anthony must discover the means to break through his numbness in order to learn about the possibility of love. This is achieved through his staggeringly beautiful, but hardened neighbor, Juliette Dimiglio. Her character is etched pefectly by Reiken; Juliette's psychological scars cannot overtake her physical perfection, and her sense of detachment (born through her mother's suicide and an eerily masochistic relationship with her boyfriend) begins to melt only through a wonderous encounter with Anthony. Anthony's father, Michael, comes to symbolize both the deadening realities and endless possibilities of middle-age. His divorce leads to existential loneliness and a renewed belief in the existence of a b'shert, that one special person who completes and fulfills the other.

It is this hope of love, of completion, of achieving grace which elevates this special novel. Each of the central characters attempts to awaken him or herself; each sloughs off the deadening qualities of sterile relationships and hopeless despair and searches for authenticity. This search for perfection, amidst sterility, sadness, destruction and despair, presents the stuff of legends. Anthony, himself, articulates this sense as he attempts to explain the phenomena of his life in a legendary paradigm. "He didn't understand why he did this, because New Jersey was not legend. It was the armpit of America, according to most people. Still he saw everything around him as legend."

By novel's end, Frederick Reiken has given us reason to believe as well.

Wonderful! Wonderful!! Wonderful!! I grew up in New Jersey and to see towns, places, streets and other things mentioned within the story brought the whole book and story alive!!! A great book and a wonderful story, Three days and I was done ready it! That says alot for me!! Hope to see many more works from this young man. There is so much to write about the people of this wonderful state. The family life is boundless. Each generation and each family has a story!!!