“I then realized that the cathedral is a monument to our grief. It is a shrine for all our dead, constructed of the wreckage of the lives that have fallen down around us.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perksie  (FEB 14, 2014)

Swan Gondola literally starts off with a bang! Two elderly sisters, Emmaline and Hester, known by most in their small county, as the “Old Sisters Egan,” are sitting in their Nebraska farm kitchen drinking coffee. The day has been a peaceful one. Suddenly the house begins to shiver and shake and they are enveloped in noise, a loud BANG!! Books fall from their shelves, china dishes and cups fall to the floor, breaking, chimney bricks drop into the hearth, their caged canaries stop singing and the two sisters are left stunned, shocked. Hester, the tough one, lifts her rifle and opens the door, not knowing what to expect. She and petite, romantic Emmaline, are immediately enveloped in silk. Silk is everywhere. They have witnessed so much in their lives on the farm that nothing really surprises them anymore. The silk comes from a ruined hot air balloon which has apparently crashed into their roof. “Escaped the circus?” Hester wonders. The two immediately search for the pilot, who could be hurt or, even worse, dead. They do find the man alive, flat on his back on the ground, his left leg in a terrible bend. Emmaline’s and Hester’s discovery of the balloon’s pilot will change their lives forever as he relates his strange, mesmerizing and sorry tale.

Obviously in pain, the man snaps his fingers weakly and a card slips from his sleeve which reads, “B. ‘Ferret’ Skerritt, Omaha, Nebraska.” And on the back “This slight of hand you just witnessed is only a hint of my wizardry.” From his inside pocket a postcard falls. Written by Ferret, it gives the reader an example of his unrequited love for his beloved, Mrs. Cecily Wakefield of Omaha. Their’s is a star-crossed love…dramatic, romantic and heartbreaking.

Thus we meet our protagonist whose name is really Bartholomew Skerritt. He is an orphan, (now 25 years-old), left at the door of a Catholic orphanage when he was an infant. Sister Patience told him, “All orphans are born of whores.” There was a note that his mother had tucked into his little suit. “She had addressed the baby as Mr. Bartholomew Skerritt and written: ‘Your last name is your daddy’s last name, (I’m damned sure of it, don’t let anybody tell you different), and your first name was the longest first name I’ve ever seen written down. I can’t give you nothing much but I can give you a name with lots of letters in it. Sincerely, the mother you never knew.'” Reflecting back on his childhood, Ferret says: “Childhood is too awful a thing to make happen to somebody.”

When he was a boy he met librarian, Mr. Crowe. Crowe’s real vocation is that of a ventriloquist. He took a shine to Bartholomew and taught him about the world of books, and more importantly to the boy’s future, how to excel as a ventriloquist.

Ferret has become a petty thief and con-man who currently works as a ventriloquist and a magician at a vaudeville theater, (before the Fair). He usually follows the carny circuit with his unique dummy, Oscar. It is at the Empress Opera House where he meets and immediately falls in love with the mysterious Cecily, an actress with an unknown history. “I heard her name before I saw her, backstage.”

The narrative takes place in the Sisters Egan’s farmhouse while he is recovering. The ever practical Hester, who acts as the community’s amateur veterinarian, has patched him up and put his leg in a cast. It is at the farmhouse where he relates his tale. The author effectively uses letters from Ferret to Cecily, and from Cecily to him, to further the storyline, which weaves back and forth in time from Autumn 1898 to the winter of 1899.

This story-within-a-story begins in the spring of 1898, at the opening of the Omaha World’s Fair. Omaha, Nebraska, is still a noisy, dirty frontier city whose nickname was the “Gateway to the West.” The author writes, “The Omaha World’s Fair, as depicted in  The Swan Gondola,  is a fictional approximation of the “Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition.” The author’s version of the Omaha World’s Fair was held from June 1 to November 1 of 1898. Its goal was to showcase the development of the entire West, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast. Over 2.6 million people came to Omaha to view the 4,062 exhibits during the four months of the Fair. President William McKinley was among the dignitaries who attended. McKinley, in a cameo role here, is immersed in the Spanish-American War, yet still makes time to attend.

Already known as the “New White City,” this fair tries to one-up the fair at Chicago, originally called the “White CIty.” Chicago’s fair took place in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World in 1492. The Omaha Fair is much different from Chicago’s, as there is very little “white” about it. Behind the scenes at the Fair, another story takes place, a sleazier story: that of the “rousties,” those workers who put the fair together and take it down; ZigZag the clown, Rosie the anarchist and friend to Ferriet as well as August, another close friend of our protagonist. August is an eccentric Native American homosexual who has a crush on Ferrit. Also among the fair’s “players” are the ragtime player, the nervous lion tamer, the waltzing dwarves, can-can dancers, hootchy kootchy showgirls, etc. They are all looking to make a buck from the “gillies,” (civilians), legally or illegally. This “carny-like” background really enriches The Swan Gondola.  The author has said in an interview, “As for the genre of carnival fiction – perhaps its appeal rests in the hodgepodge of it all. Our concept of an American carnival brings to mind childhood delights, but also an element of the seedy, the deceptive, and the decidedly adult. A carnival is a bit of a fever dream – it’s all cotton candy and sex, on a dirt lot.”

“The Swan Gondola” is situated on a lagoon on the midway. It is at the gondola that Ferret and Cecily meet and conduct their romance, at least initially. Ferret is obsessed with Cecily from the first moment he sees her. His obsession drives the narrative.

The Swan Gondola is a novel that grabbed me from page one until the very end. The characters are well fleshed-out and complex and the writing is tight – no unnecessary filler. Readers will be ensnared by the offbeat personalities and carried along by the unexpected plot developments. Timothy Schaffert clearly did a tremendous amount of research for this book. It seems that the author is a huge fan of L. Frank Baum’s “Wizard of Oz,” as demonstrated in this tale. A riveting piece of historical fiction from page one to the very end. I highly recommend this novel. It is original and entertaining and gives one a good look at the goings-on at a fair, a carny show or a circus.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (February 6, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perksie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Timothy Schaffert
EXTRAS:	Swan Gondola Nostalgia
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Coffins of Little Hope

Bibliography:

• The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (2002)
• The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (2005)
• Devils in the Sugar Shop (2007)
• The Coffins of Little Hope (2011)
• The Swan Gondola (February 2014)

“The park slumbers through the long winter, weighed down by ice and snow, dreaming of spring…..as it drowses beneath its quilt of snow, it dreams of all the people who flocked to its midways: men, women and especially children, the joy the park brought them, the laughter that was like oxygen for the park, which breathed it in as it floated up from the Cyclone, the Funhouse, the Wild Mouse, the Carousel.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (JAN 25, 2014)

Palisades Park is no roller coaster ride of a novel, rather it is a well written love letter to a “cherished part of the author’s childhood.” (author’s quote). This is a fascinating historical fiction, written with love to a magical place and era long gone.

Located high atop the New Jersey Palisades’ cliffs, within the boroughs of Cliffside Park and Fort Lee, once stood the home of the famous Cyclone roller coaster, the Tunnel of Love and the world’s largest salt water pool. The place was called Palisades Amusement Park and even today, over thirty years after it closed its gates, the Park is still warmly remembered, with nostalgia, by many, many people. This novel strikes a particular chord with me as I was born and raised in Atlantic City, NJ, (way before the casinos marred the beauty of the town, and the majestic, beautifully designed hotels were torn down to make room for tacky casino architecture). I was a regular at Steel Pier and Million Dollar Pier and would ride the “rides” even when I was in college.

The protagonist of this tale is the Park itself, inhabiting 30 acres across the Hudson River from New York City. The glue holding the storyline together is a carnie family, the Stopkas. Eddie Stopka ran away from home in his teens, during the Great Depression and Prohibition. He rode the rails until he got a job at Palisades Park “sweeping up.” It was here where Eddie meets Adele Worth who works at a root beer concession. He is attracted to her because she is beautiful and he is also amused by her “pitch.” She would call, “Root beer, ice-cold root beer! Only legal beer in the Park! Not as much fun as malt, but just as delicious and twice as foamy! C’mon, lift a glass to Carrie Nation!!”

Adele’s father used to be a well known film director in Fort Lee, NJ. His company was called Worth While Pictures. Eventually the film industry relocates to Hollywood, thus ending his career in the movies. He remains bitter about this change for the rest of his life and drinks heavily as a result. Adele was just 6 months old when she “acted” in her first film, “Babes in Arms.” As a pre-teen she meets big stars like Douglas Fairbanks and silent film actress Blanche Sweet. The lovely Adele is crowned Miss Bergen County. She comes to work at Palisades hoping to be noticed by anyone who can help her get a job in the film industry. And why not? “Everyone” visits Palisades Park! She holds on to her dream of being a movie star all her life.

Eddie and Adele eventually marry and their children Antoinette, a tomboy, fantasizes about being a great diver, like the daredevil she sees at the park who jumps from a 90-foot tower into a water tank six feet deep. She insists, to her mother’s dismay, that she be called Toni and is definitely more into swimming and trying to climb the Palisades than in playing with dolls. Her younger brother Jack has a real knack for drawing and a love of action comic book characters. Eventually, when their parents buy a “joint,” (a carny concession), the children work there. This is their real home, more so than the house where they live in Edgewater, NJ.

In 1912, the park added a salt-water swimming pool. It is filled by pumping water from the saline Hudson River, 200 feet below. This pool, 400 by 600 feet in surface area, is billed as the largest salt-water wave pool in the nation. Behind the water falls are huge pontoons that rise up and down as they rotate, creating a one-foot wave in the pool. This pool  eventually plays a big role in Toni’s life.

The carnival “freaks” “Jolly Irene, the Fattest Woman In The World,” “Susi, The Elephant-Skinned Girl,” “Charles Phelan, Strong Man,” “Victor-Victoria – Half Man, Half Woman,” “Hoppe The Frog Boy,” etc., are not freaks to the children or their parents, they are just friends and colleagues on the midway. Here there is an aura of camaraderie. Vendors help each other through fire, sickness, poverty and loss. Annually the Rosenthal brothers, who own the park, add new rides. They also construct a 24-foot high, one million watt marquee advertising Palisades Park.

The park’s reputation and attendance continues to grow throughout the 1950s and 1960s, largely due to saturation advertising and the continued success of the park’s music pavilion and the Caisson bar. In addition, behind the Palisade Park music stage lay the park’s worst-kept secret: a hole in the fence used by local children to sneak into the park without paying admission. Despite the fact that the Rosenthal brothers know all about this breach, it is purposely left unrepaired.

Palisades Park spans several decades, 1922-1971 (the closing of the park). We experience, through the author’s writing and impeccable research, the evolution of the Park. Some of the well-incorporated historical details include: The Great Depression, President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, the peacetime draft, big band music, Hitler, Pearl Harbor, Mafia hits, racial discrimination, the Korean War, and the 1960’s, which brought a major change to American culture. The reader also learns about the Park’s history which runs parallel to world history. There were major events here which effected both the families who worked at Palisades and those who came to be entertained. A few devastating fires, the bane of amusement parks everywhere, resulted in extraordinary damage, including terrible injuries and, sometimes, death. The resulting loss of property caused those who owned concessions to rebuild or go to work elsewhere, traveling the carnie circuit.

Alan Brennert magically brings to life a way of life. The character of Palisades Park in all its moods, and the people, especially the engaging Stopkas, are vividly portrayed in this enjoyable novel.

My “however moment,” is this – although this is a very entertaining read, the characters are not complex at all. There is nothing in their life stories which has not been written about before. The novelty is the Park itself and the view of history which the author brings to the story. Yet I found myself satisfied, even through these shortcomings, because of other aspects, written about above, which makes this a hard to put down book.

I think the character of Park owner Irving Rosenthal sums things up when he says,

“A place like this – it’s like a living thing, the way people interact with it, how they think of it. For kids like you who grew up around here, it’s always been a part of your lives – it’s personal. Sell it to someone like Walt Disney, and it’s no longer the same park. I want it to be the same, to go one living after I’m gone. We’re at the top of our game now. Palisades has never been more popular, more famous. What’s wrong with wanting that to go on? Nobody wants summer to end.”

Palisades finally closed its doors on September 12, 1971 to make room for high rise condominiums but the memories live on.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 203 readers
PUBLISHER:	St. Martin’s Griffin (October 29, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alan Brennert
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Wikipedia page on Palisades Amusement Park
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Honolulu Moloka’i And this gator-themed fictional amusement park: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Bibliography:

• Kindred Spirits (1984)
• Time and Chance (1990)
• Her Pilgrim Soul and Other Stories (1990)
• Moloka’i (2003)
• Honolulu (2009)
• Palisades Park (April 2013)

“You thought you couldn’t stand not to know a thing until you knew it, wasn’t that right? Who had said that, the Chief? Some poet from the Library Boat, maybe.

Knowledge at last, Kiwi’s mind recited dutifully. The fish’s living eye glass.

Sometimes you would prefer a mystery to remain red-gilled and buried inside you, Kiwi decided, alive and alive inside you.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (FEB 02, 2011)

In her hotly-anticipated debut novel, Swamplandia!, Karen Russell returns to the mosquito-droves and muggy-haze of the Florida Everglades and the gator-themed amusement park featured in her short story, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” that opened her widely-praised 2006 collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. It was that collection, with its exuberant mix of satire and fabulism, that secured Russell’s reputation as one of the most exciting up-and-comers around and earned her a coveted spot on The New Yorker’s much buzzed about “20 under 40” list last fall. With her energetic prose, quirky settings, and fantastical plots, Russell is a writer’s whose style forces you to sit up and take notice, sometimes at the cost of emotional involvement with her work. However, Swamplandia!, with all its flashing-neon prose is an insightful (and surprisingly funny) exploration of the loss of innocence that inevitably follows the death of a parent.

In the year following her mother’s death, 13-year-old Ava Bigtree quickly learns how “one tragedy can beget another and another.” Since birth, their family-owned, 100-acre island attraction, Swamplandia!, has been Ava’s home. Its 98 alligators (all named after their original gator, Seth, because as Chief Bigtree likes to say “Tradition is as important as promotional materials are expensive.”), Reptile Walk, Live Chicken Thursday feeding shows, and lone mammal, a balding, rhythmless bear named Judy Garland, have all helped Swamplandia! hold its position as the “Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café” in southwestern Florida. That, and Ava’s mother’s gator-swim routine. However, when Hilola Bigtree dies of ovarian cancer, Chief Bigtree, lost in his own fog of grief, fails to amend the promotional materials and tourists continue to file off the Mainland-Swamplandia! ferry eager to watch the “Swamp Centaur” swim through a gator pit “planked with great grey and black bodies.” Initially, the disappointed mainlanders are understanding –- after all, a family has lost its mother – but, their hijacked sympathy soon swings to money-back-demanding indignation, until a new corporate theme park, the World of Darkness, opens just off the highway, and the tourists stop coming altogether.

With the tourists gone and their father increasingly preoccupied, Ava and her dreamy older sister, Osceola, (white-haired and violet-eyed, Ossie resembles “the doomed sibling you see in those Wild West daguerreotypes, the one who makes you think Oh God take the picture quick; this one isn’t long for this world”) are left alone with empty days to fill. The girls take to hanging out on the abandoned library boat with their studious brother, Kiwi. Kiwi is the kind of guy who gives himself report cards and studies for his SATs long before he’s even stepped foot inside a high school, and so he scoffs when he learns that Ava and Osceola plan to contact their mother with Ossie’s newly acquired occult powers and their homemade Ouija board.

Their unsuccessful séances crush Ava, but when Ossie starts using the Ouija board on her own to meet other ghosts –strange men! – Ava tattles to their father: her sister is dating men, dead ones. Burdened by the park’s mounting debt and his own mismanaged grief, Chief Bigtree isn’t up to dealing with his lonely and disturbed 16-year old daughter.

Or anything else, for that matter.

Angry at his father’s inability to face their increasingly precarious financial situation, Kiwi runs away to the mainland to save his family from destitution and is initiated into the realities of minimum-wage labor as a peon at the World of Darkness. And so, when the Chief disappears to the mainland on mysterious business, Ava and Osceola are left to fend for themselves in the swamp. However, as Osceola’s romance with the ghost of a ill-fated, Depression-era dredgeman, Louis Thanksgiving, intensifies, Ava is left increasingly alone. When Ossie runs off to the Underworld to elope with Louis Thanksgiving, a mysterious stranger, the Bird Man, offers to be Ava’s guide in her quest to retrieve her sister

Forget Dante’s rings or Homer’s River Styx; this is mangrove swamp as the Underworld! With its fecundity and “blue lozenge” water ways, Ava frets that the swamp doesn’t look much like the underworld she’s read about in books, but with its “leafy catacombs,” ravenous mosquitoes, and “rotten-egg smell [that] rose off the pools of water that collected beneath the mangrove’s stilted roots,” but I can’t think of a milieu more likely to harbor ghosts.

Part of successfully navigating the swamps of adolescence involves knowing which beliefs to cling to tenaciously, and which to modify, if not altogether discard. Although the inevitable loss of innocence that follows is heart-breaking, as the Bigtree children learn that life on the mainland is just as imperfect as life on the swamp, that loving a ghost, if possible, comes with a steep cost, that mothers, once dead, stay gone, Russell never lets us lose our sense of humor. Moreover, as Ava oscillates between her girlish beliefs and her adult awakening, Russell maintains expert control over the narrative. So much so, in fact, that the reader, like Ava, is unsure of exactly what to believe. That is, until disaster strikes, and the reader is left sharing Ava’s sentiment: we should have seen it coming all along.

Ava and Osceola’s story is about loneliness, loss and sisterly love, but Kiwi’s sudden emersion in the ways of the contemporary teen helps to lighten some of that darkness. Fascinated by the alien customs around him, Kiwi takes to writing down his observations while his colleagues take to calling him Margaret Mead. His education into mainland life is perceptive, and often hilarious.

Swamplandia! is a quirky, but well-crafted read, and Russell’s prose is dynamite. While the ending might be too pat for some, I was so impressed by Russell’s knack for description and laughed far too many times (really!) to hold it against the book. Karen Russell has been likened to writers as wide ranging as Amy Hempel, George Saunders, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kelly Link and Judy Blume, and while her energetic prose might be too exhausting for some, if her writing is anything, it’s this: original.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 462 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	MacArthur Foundation page on Karen Russell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Southern Florida story: Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

Bibliography:

• St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006)
• Swamplandia! (2011)
• Vampires in the Lemon Grove ( 2013)
• Sleep Donation: A Novella (March 2014)