Customer Reviews

Paradise, New York

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

I started reading this book after I read a review of it in the Boston Globe over the summer; it sounded like an intriguing book. After neglecting my work (and sleep) to read it (twice!) and after thinking about it again and again all this time, I felt compelled to put in my two cents' worth here. For starters, the reviewer didn't come close to praising this book enough. This is a fabulously entertaining, smart, touching book, intelligent and readable at the same time. I'm glad to see that other readers loved this book as much as I did (except for that last review, which is really rather annoying and confused... I mean, Faustian? The point is, this is an amazing book). Reading this book propels you into a completely different world, one where you are glad to linger and look around. This is the kind of book that makes you want to be friends with the protagonist. I truly loved this book.

I just loved this novel -- I kept reading it all night and neglected everything else until I had finished it. The characters are intelligent, funny, imperfect, mostly well-meaning, sometimes highly eccentric, self-aware, and very memorable. Lucy, who tells the story, is lovable, smart without being cynical, moving and even heroic. Eileen Pollack makes the failing Catskills resort she writes about seem so real that reading this (very contemporary) book gives the kind of pleasure that you get from just losing yourself in a wonderfully written 19th century novel. Like Grace Paley, Eileen Pollack allows her characters great human dignity, even as she shows their human weaknesses. She is funny, but never unkind. Reading this, I felt I had been on a trip I was happy to have taken, and I came back to my own life knowing more than I had when I set out on that adventure. The book is about all the things that matter: love, family, the ways we embrace or reject our histories, the need to make something out of ourselves, the effects of nostalgia. This novel is the real thing -- I recommend it highly!

I bought this book after reading a positive review in Hadassah magazine, and the praise was well warranted. I enjoyed the story line, and particularly the hopes, dreams, and struggles of the characters. Ms. Pollack tackled the subject of race relations in a satisfying way. The Catskills were a place I vaguely remember visiting as a child when my grandparents would make their annual summer trek. To learn something of the history and demise of the "borsht belt" made for fascinating reading. Most interestly, I mentioned the book to a non-Jewish, 65-year old neighbor when I was through, not necessarily thinking she'd want to read it. It turned out that she and a close friend worked at one of those hotels in the 1950's when they were in college. Not only did she love the book, she told me the portrayal of the dynamics of hotel life was right on target and even helped her understand some of what she experienced that summer.

With Paradise New York, Eileen Pollack has done what so many attempt, yet so few accomplish; she generously gives her readers poignant characters for whom we at once sympathise, chastise, and recognize as real and three dimensional. With the all-too human but always lovable Lucy as our guide, we follow Pollack on a path that successfully incorporates redemption, oppression, and a search for spirituality, love, and meaning in a life that can prove as difficult as it is miraculous. I can't wait for her next novel!

With a title like 'Paradise, New York', and a cast of characters who are primarily Jewsih, one enters this book with an Old Testament mindset- that is, we wait for the Fall. The Fall we get is somewhat pitiful as the Eden here isn't a land of splendor and endless earthly pleasure. In fact there doesn't seem to be any real pleasure, earthly or otherwise, here at all. What we do have is a group of interesting characters, though they are somewhat limited in what they do. There is an interesting Faust-ian subtext, and the book is interesting and well-written, once you get around the rhetorical questions used to establish interiority in the characters.