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Summary: American Library Association Booklist review
Review: Grossinger, a teacher, writer, and publisher, opens the journey of his life to us in this huge, sprawling tangle of threads and tales. He is--and is not--of the Grossinger family that founded and lost the famed Catskills resort, and he writes compellingly of it rise and fall, rich with memories for New York Jews and others whose childhoods and families were inextricably bound to the resort. He writes of marriage, children, and university life in the '60s and '70s, painting a darker picture than some might remember but capturing its elusive, cannabis-scented texture. He chronicles his extended family and its enormous secrets and terrible demons, probing with relentless attention his haunted brother and, especially, his beautiful and quite monstrous mother. He does all of this more or less simultaneously, so the reader moves from one to another of these stories in wonder at their inevitable links and segues. It is rich in the evocation of New York and the Catskills in the '50s, New England and the Bay Area in the '60s and '70s, and amazement of watching your own children become people, and the sustaining pleasures of baseball, especially the Mets. Somehow it not only hangs together but is actually richer for is energy: one doesn't wish to deconstruct it into the many books it could have been. Exhausting, exhilarating, extraordinary. --GraceAnne A. DeCandido
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