Big Money, Big Houses and Big Problems in Brooklyn Heights
In Jenny Jackson’s debut novel, “Pineapple Street,” readers get a tour of a world they might learn not to envy by the end of the book.
“Pineapple Street” is set in the elegant world of Brooklyn Heights. Credit... Bianca Bagnarelli
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- March 3, 2023
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PINEAPPLE STREET, by Jenny Jackson
A certain Great American Novelist known for writing about the very rich was of the opinion that they were different from you and me. They were, and a century later, they still are, and we still want to read about them, for reasons both obvious (mainly to do with schadenfreude) and less so (mainly because, at the end of the day, we may not be so different at all).
Still, it’s no small thing to ask a reader in 2023 to empathize with characters who are not only exceedingly wealthy but generationally exceedingly wealthy, and who say things like “Oh no! I left my Cartier bracelet in Lena’s BMW and she’s leaving soon for her grandmother’s house in Southampton!”
This is the challenge Jenny Jackson has set herself, and not only does she succeed in getting us not to loathe the Stocktons, the family at the center of her debut novel, “Pineapple Street,” but she even succeeds in persuading us to love them. A little bit. Even if … OK … a little bit against our will.
This is an unabashedly old-fashioned story involving wills, trust funds, prenups and property — lots of property, and so much of it in a single refined corner of Brooklyn that family members (Chip and Tilda Stockton and their adult children: Cord, Darley and Georgiana) refer to the mother ship among their family holdings as “the limestone.”
The Stocktons are a real estate family, but not like a real estate family from, say, Queens, who might delineate success by putting their family name on everything in sight. Instead, they’re under the radar, happy to be known by people they have always known in Brooklyn Heights, the Hamptons and at their clubs, where they play tennis constantly (and competitively) against one another.
Tilda is “of a generation that despised difficult conversations and shut down at the slightest hint of conflict or unpleasantness,” but that reticence has also been passed down to her daughters, Darley (a brilliant businesswoman now at home with her children) and Georgiana (who works, without much engagement, at a philanthropic organization located in a Brooklyn mansion). Tilda is that frustrating mix of a person who will move out of “the limestone” after many decades in order to offer it to her son, Cord, and his new wife, Sasha — who is from Rhode Island and emphatically not the Newport end of the state, either — but still police her daughter-in-law’s “tablescape” arrangements and forbid her to throw away so much as a trophy from outgrown and abandoned bedrooms when she comes over for dinner.
Sasha is one of the novel’s three protagonists, sharing the role with her sisters-in-law, Darley and Georgiana. Sasha has carefully chosen Cord as a husband who loves but does not need her, and she is happily married to him, even as his parents and sisters mystify her. How to comprehend a family that offers her an enormous house to live in, free of charge, but still refuses to make room for her in any meaningful way?
Back in Rhode Island, her own hardworking family is so porous that it has essentially absorbed her ex-boyfriend, keeping his favorite foods in their pantry and setting out a stocking for him at Christmas. (They were “a restaurant booth. You could always scoot in and make space for one more. Cord’s family was a table with chairs and those chairs were bolted to the floor.”) It’s a mystery that intrigues and even amuses her, at least until she overhears her sisters-in-law referring to her as a gold digger — an insult arising from an unfortunate misunderstanding about a prenup. What makes Sasha different from her fellow Stocktons is so apparent that her in-laws’ friends mistake her for a server at their parties, even when she attempts to introduce herself. “Oh, I’m Sasha,” she says, as a guest tries to hand her an empty glass. “Thank you, Sasha,” the guest replies, cheerfully.
It’s no wonder, then, that Sasha is in the dark about a few key current events in the family. Darley is married to Malcolm, a Korean American consultant with a passion for all things aviation. Darley’s own decision not to insist on a prenup reflects the fact that her husband is on the cusp of a great career, and the agreement itself “felt like arranging their eventual divorce.”
Besides, Darley takes less of an entitled view of her wealth: “She didn’t feel the money belonged to her anyway. It belonged to her grandparents and her great-grandparents. She had done nothing but act as a drain — private school and vacations and clothing and death by the thousand cuts that was raising a child in the most expensive city in America.”
Practically speaking, forgoing the same prenup her sister-in-law, Sasha, will eventually confront means passing her trust fund down to her two children. Metaphorically speaking, the decision is on par with a life-altering gamble in which she has “locked herself out of her own inheritance and bet all her chips on love.” Not such a concern when her husband’s career is thriving, but then Malcolm is collaterally damaged by the careless actions of a co-worker, and it starts to look like a bad bet. Naturally, she tells not a single Stockton about this reversal of fortune.
Georgiana is keeping a few secrets of her own. The youngest Stockton carefully withholds news of an ill-advised affair with a colleague when she’s hobnobbing at family gatherings, including regular tennis matches with her mother. This culminates in a uniquely 1 percent crisis; when Georgiana, reeling from a traumatic event and too many costume parties, takes the major step of finally opening the statements for her trust accounts — “one from GeeGee and DeeDee and one from Pip and Pop” — she discovers that her personal fortune runs to eight figures. What is to be done with such alarming information? What is privilege supposed to be for, if personal happiness seems so utterly beside the point? For that matter, what is the point of a family — even an insular and overly involved family — if one doesn’t turn to them when it matters?
The author — a respected editor at Alfred A. Knopf — has an obvious familiarity with the “fruit streets” of Brooklyn Heights, and the families who inhabit them. The enmeshment of those families has a haunting counterpart in the area’s former occupation by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose tunnels connected (and perhaps still connect) many of the properties the church once owned. Those tunnels might have made sense when everyone belonged to the same organization, but what can they mean for a modern Brooklyn neighborhood? “What were you supposed to do when there was a whole underground lair full of laundry rooms and storage cages connecting your apartment building to a stranger’s?” What indeed?
“Pineapple Street” has more in common with a backward-gazing Gilded Age novel like John P. Marquand’s 1937 blockbuster “ The Late George Apley ” than with, say, a Gilded Age novel written during the actual Gilded Age, but Marquand’s long-ago readers probably weren’t conflicted about the subject matter; one can’t quite imagine a 1937 book group debating the justification for reading about such wealthy and insular people, let alone Marquand wrestling with whether it was appropriate to be writing about them! Today, doing either feels almost defiant.
And while Jackson’s characters are admirably complex and not un-self-aware, and while they do ruminate on privilege and what it provides — Darley’s version invokes the “respectable” pursuit of high-priced academia, while Sasha’s involves her “infamous” cousins who “avoided mile-long rap sheets” thanks to their dad, the local chief of police — the concept of entitlement never quite leaves the novel’s background. What remains resolutely in the foreground? Those “tablescapes,” lost items of jewelry, expensive private schools, trust funds and, of course, the pesky prenups that help drive the plot, just as they drove the plots of Austen, Dickens, Trollope … and even that guy who wrote about the very rich a century ago.
Take these things as they are or don’t take them at all; the novel and its author offer no apologies. And if you prefer not to read about absurdly wealthy people and their very human problems? Well, you’re in luck, because our current “shelfscape” is rich in novels about people who are not absurdly wealthy, and their very human problems. Because, let me tell you about the very poor: They are not so different from you and me, either.
Jean Hanff Korelitz’s latest novel is “The Latecomer.”
PINEAPPLE STREET | By Jenny Jackson | 320 pp. | Pamela Dorman Books | $28
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PINEAPPLE STREET
by Jenny Jackson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 2023
A remarkably enjoyable visit with the annoying one percent, as close to crazy rich WASPs as WASPs can get.
Money makes the world go round, particularly the world of an elite Brooklyn family.
"On good days, Sasha could acknowledge how incredibly lucky she was to live in her house. It was a four-story Brooklyn limestone, a massive, formal palace that could have held ten of the one-bedroom apartments Sasha had lived in before. But on bad days...." As Sasha finally admits in a gloves-off monologue following a gender reveal party gone awry, on bad days, it's "a janky Grey Gardens full of old toothbrushes and moldy baskets." A wealthier cousin of Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's The Nest , Knopf editor Jackson's fiction debut is a comedy of manners charting the fates of the Stockton siblings and their spouses, circling around the house where they grew up in Brooklyn Heights, now inhabited by Cord and his wife, Sasha, who is referred to as the Gold Digger by Cord's sisters, Darley and Georgiana. That's unfair, though: Sasha signed a prenup. Meanwhile, Darley and her husband, Malcolm, a Korean American aviation-industry analyst who did not sign a prenup, are living off their own money as Darley fights the tedium of the entitled mommy lifestyle. Georgiana, much younger than her siblings, still single, is considered the do-gooder of the family because she works for a nonprofit, where she becomes involved in a passionate and very ill-advised relationship. From the opening scene, where Sasha's mother-in-law shows up to dinner with an entire replacement menu and a revised "tablescape," Jackson has a deft hand with all the passive-aggressive interactions that are so common in family life, perhaps particularly in this socio-economic stratum. She knows her party themes, her tennis clubs, her silent auctions, and her WASP family dynamics. Rich-people jokes, cultural acuity, and entertaining banter keep this novel moving at a sprightly pace as the characters learn their lessons about money and morals, though some of the virtuous reform seems a little much.
Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-59-349069-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION
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New York Times Bestseller
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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THE NIGHTINGALE
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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book review: Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson
Overview: The Stockton family has long called the fruit streets of Brooklyn home, and even as their children grew up and moved out, they stayed nearby. Pineapple Street looks at a period in the wealthy family's life from three distinct perspectives. We experience the events of the story through youngest daughter, Georgiana, who's in her early twenties and the baby of the family, Darley, the oldest of the daughters, and Sasha, the brother's new wife who sees all the happenings of the Stockton's lavish lifestyle as a bewildered outsider. Overall: 5
Characters: 5 While we only have 3 point of view characters, all of the Stocktons get rich portraits drawn over the course of the book. Having these three different vantage points is also what makes the story so fascinating. It seems intentional and is impactful that Jackson chose to tell the story through the points of view of the three younger women in the family, and they do exhibit the most growth as the book progresses.
Sasha always feels like the outsider. She grew up middle class in Rhode Island and often feels like she came from a different planet entirely than the Stockton household where each kid inherited tens of millions of dollars when their grandparents died and high society is their second language. She's the grounding force that puts into perspective the outlandish issues the family creates. Sasha also quickly bonds with Darley's husband Malcom as the only other outsider who doesn't understand the strange intricacies of their life. Sasha runs up against many pain points as she strives to find allies within the family as Darley and Georgiana are convinced that she's just a gold digger. As Sasha starts her new life with her husband, Cord, including moving into the Stockton's family home on Pineapple Street, she'll have to figure out how to claim her own space is a family devoted to keeping things the same.
Darley is a few years older than Sasha and has two kids. Much of Darley's story centers around her struggles as a stay at home mom questioning her loss of identity and income potential. The question of inheritance is also centered in Darley's story as she's chosen to forgo access to her trust and pass it directly to her children so that her husband, Malcom, didn't have to sign a prenup. Because she became a stay at home mom after her second child, though, that leaves her in the tough position of not having an income of her own. While Darley has grown up in her parents' New York society world, she still doesn't have an effortless experience navigating the politics of private elementary school and what happens when a seemingly steady single income vanishes overnight.
Finally, Georgiana is in her early twenties and has never known a world beyond her privileged bubble. She lives in an apartment she bought with a down payment from her trust, she works a low paying job at a nonprofit with no regard for what her salary even is, and she's generally pretty self absorbed, something Sasha is always keen to point out. Being the youngest, Georgiana also follows the greatest evolution over the course of the novel. She meets a few people who make her seriously question her life trajectory and belief systems, looking beyond her tennis ranking for the most important things in life for the first time. Over the course of the novel, Georgiana questions everything she's ever known about her family and the world.
Plot: 5 The multiple perspectives keeps the book moving as we get increased tension from knowing sides of the story that the other point of view characters we read about are oblivious too, so there's plenty of foreshadowing and extra painful miss communication. The tension and pacing are incredible, especially considering how slow and tedious some literary fiction books dealing with similar themes have been. This book is certainly looking for the line right between literary and commercial and does a beautiful job finding it. I have to wonder if this is owing to the fact that the author is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. The book certainly has a sense of being aware of its readers need for drama and intrigue, and it's tightly plotted. Somehow, even in this wild family, there was only one point that felt like it pushed the details of the scene to a bit of an over the top place.
Writing: 5 I couldn't put the book down from the very first page. The book hits the right notes of having a compelling plot and characters that you become quite invested in despite all of their flaws and lack of a connection to earth. At the end of the day, though, the book is truly about cutting through the noise to realize there are very few things that truly matter in the end, and family, even a dysfunctional one, is worth more than any divides that come between them from money, status, or perceptions.
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2 novels to cure your winter blahs: Ephron's 'Heartburn' and 'Pineapple Street'
Maureen Corrigan
I met a good friend for dinner the other night and told her I was rereading Nora Ephron 's novel, Heartburn , which has just come out in a 40 th anniversary edition. " I'm so pissed off ," this friend said, echoing Meryl Streep 's words at Ephron's memorial service in 2012. "Why isn't she still here?"
My friend and I locked eyes over our margaritas and nodded. We didn't have to tick off all the ways we needed Ephron's tough wit to help us through things. It's sentimental to say so, but when such a beloved writer's voice is stilled, you really do feel more alone, less armored against the world.
I've read Heartburn three times since it came out in 1983. Some of its jokes haven't aged well, such as wisecracks about lesbians and Japanese men with cameras, but the pain that underlies its humor is as fresh as a paper cut. For those who don't know the novel, Heartburn takes place mostly in an elite Washington, D.C., world of journalists and politicians and is a roman à clef about the break-up of Ephron's marriage to reporter Carl Bernstein , of Watergate fame.
The year was 1979 and Ephron was pregnant with the couple's second child when she discovered Bernstein was having an affair with Margaret Jay, the then-wife of the then-British ambassador. In Heartburn , her character is famously skewered as: "a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb."
Everyone who's read Heartburn or seen the movie — with Meryl Streep playing Ephron's fictional alter ego, cookbook author Rachel Samstat — remembers the climactic dinner party scene where Rachel throws a key lime pie at the face of her cheating husband. (In real life, Ephron poured a bottle of red wine over Bernstein's head.) It's as though Ephron, herself the child of two golden age Hollywood screenwriters, took one of the oldest clichés in comedy — the pie in the face — and updated it to be a symbol of second-wave feminist fed-up-ed-ness.
But what precedes that moment is anguish. In that climactic scene, Rachel thinks this about her husband who's sitting across the table from her:
"I still love you. ... I still find you interesting, ... But someday I won't anymore. And in the meantime, I'm getting out. I am no beauty, ... and I am terrified of being alone, ... but I would rather die than sit here and pretend it's okay, I would rather die than sit here figuring out how to get you to love me again. ... I can't stand sitting here with all this rage turning to hurt and then to tears."
Like her idol, Dorothy Parker , Ephron knew that the greatest comedy arises out of finding ironic distance and, therefore, control over the things that make us wince, cry, despair. Ephron left us not only that key lime pie recipe, but also her recipe for coping.
And, speaking of coping, for many of us readers, coping with late winter blahs means reaching for a comic novel; not only classics like Heartburn , but also the work of new writers, such as Jenny Jackson. Her debut novel, Pineapple Street , is being likened to the work of another late, great, essentially comic writer, Laurie Colwin , because both focus on the foibles of old money families in New York City.
That comparison is a bit overblown, but Jackson's Pineapple Street stands on its own as a smart comedy of manners. This is an ensemble novel about members of the wealthy Stockton family that owns swaths of Brooklyn Heights and beyond. The most engaging plotline involves a daughter-in-law named Sasha, who hails from a "merely" middle-class background, and struggles to fit in. When her in-laws come to dinner, for instance, their indifference to her food makes her feel "like the lady at the Costco free sample table, trying to sell warm cubes of processed cheese."
Even the most insular characters in Pineapple Street , however, are aware of their privilege. Humor, being topical and dependent on sharp observation of behavior and detail, needs to keep in step with changing times, as Jackson does here. But the shock of social recognition — the moment when a good writer transforms an everyday detail about cheese cubes into an observation about the casual cruelties of class hierarchy — remains as jolting as getting or throwing a pie in the face. Here's to being the thrower!
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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, pineapple street.
PINEAPPLE STREET, a smart first novel from publishing executive Jenny Jackson, takes readers into the exclusive world of the one-percent through the lives of one wealthy family living in Brooklyn Heights.
The Stocktons are a living example of generational wealth in America today. Tilda and Chip raised their family in a gilded limestone on Pineapple Street, one of the many “fruit streets” in their Brooklyn neighborhood. Eldest daughter Darley is married to a banker named Malcolm. When they wed, she declined her trust fund (thereby foregoing the standard prenup that each Stockton spouse is expected to sign) in favor of letting her husband be the breadwinner for their family of four.
"PINEAPPLE STREET is an engaging and absorbing read, with a supremely satisfying conclusion, perfect for book groups or to pass along to a good friend."
Darley’s brother, Cord, works for their father’s real estate investment firm. His wife, Sasha, is the most unlike the rest of the family in more ways than one. She was raised solidly middle class in a seaport town in Rhode Island and has never felt fully accepted into Cord’s family, especially among his sisters. She and Malcolm have a tenuous bond, being the two outsiders, and silently mouth “NMF” (“not my family”) to each other when one of the Stocktons makes a clueless comment about trust funds or flying private. Georgiana is the youngest of the Stockton brood at 26. She has never really thought about their enormous wealth until she suffers a great loss.
The Stockton children never had to worry about money or their financial futures. But when Malcolm is fired from his prestigious banking job --- a secret that Darley keeps from her family --- she starts questioning her decision to turn down her trust fund when they married: “She thought about her own prenup for the millionth time. Maybe she had made a stupid mistake when she gave up her trust, sure. But her biggest mistake had been giving money so much power over her life. By keeping Malcolm’s secret she was buying into the idea that her world was a club only available to those with a seven-figure income.”
Cord and Sasha have moved into the family’s home on Pineapple Street when Tilda and Chip decided to “downsize” to a smaller yet stately apartment on nearby Orange Street. As grateful as Sasha is to her in-laws, the palatial mansion feels a bit staid and outdated for her tastes. She tries to make the place a home for them, but her mother-in-law dissuades her whenever she attempts any alterations: “The more Sasha thought about it, the angrier she felt. She was stuck in a lose-lose situation, a member of a family in which she had no voice, she had no vote, where doors were closed and envelopes remained sealed and money was a string that tied them all together and kept them bound and gagged.” Sasha feels even more distanced from the Stocktons when she overhears Darley and Georgiana call her a “gold digger” at a family wedding. She’s had enough.
Georgiana divides her twenty-something time between her job at a local non-profit and her family’s private tennis club. When she begins an ill-advised affair with a married coworker, she begins to question not only her own morals but also her place in the world. An impromptu meeting with school friend Curtis McCoy, a wealthy nepo baby who wants to rid himself of his family’s fortune (gained through military manufacturing), rattles Georgiana to her core. He informs her, “Income inequality is the most shameful issue of our time. I’m worried that my kids will look back and see a country that completely abandoned morality, that let people die of hunger while the wealthy took tax breaks.” Georgiana has an epiphany: “It was the money that made her so horrible. It had made her coddled and spoiled and ruined, and she had no idea what to do about it.”
Jenny Jackson’s deft debut takes on the topic of generational wealth with a keen Austenian eye, but she refrains from harshly judging her characters. She leaves it up to her readers to make up their own minds. As an inhabitant of Brooklyn Heights herself, Jackson lives among families like the Stocktons, making her a perceptive observer of their kind. PINEAPPLE STREET is an engaging and absorbing read, with a supremely satisfying conclusion, perfect for book groups or to pass along to a good friend.
Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller on April 6, 2023
Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson
- Publication Date: March 12, 2024
- Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books
- ISBN-10: 0593490711
- ISBN-13: 9780593490716
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- About the Book
A deliciously funny, sharply observed debut of family, love and class, this zeitgeisty novel follows three women in one wealthy Brooklyn clan.
Darley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected old money Stockton family, followed her heart, trading her job and her inheritance for motherhood but giving up far too much in the process. Sasha, a middle-class New England girl, has married into the Brooklyn Heights family and finds herself cast as the arriviste outsider. And Georgiana, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can’t have and must decide what kind of person she wants to be.
Rife with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York’s one-percenters, PINEAPPLE STREET is a smart, escapist novel that sparkles with wit. Full of recognizable, lovable --- if fallible --- characters, it’s about the peculiar unknowability of someone else’s family, the miles between the haves and have-nots, and the insanity of first love --- all wrapped in a story that is a sheer delight.
Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson
- Publication Date: March 12, 2024
- Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books
- ISBN-10: 0593490711
- ISBN-13: 9780593490716
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In Jenny Jackson’s debut novel, “Pineapple Street,” readers get a tour of a world they might learn not to envy by the end of the book.
Written by a publishing exec, Pineapple Street is one of those books that has been marketed heavily for months now. But is it actually any good? It’s the story of the Stocktons, an über wealthy family living in Brooklyn Heights whose generational wealth was acquired through property.
The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world.
NPR's Scott Simon asks book editor Jenny Jackson about her debut novel, "Pineapple Street," set in the well-to-do Brooklyn Heights section of New York City.
book review: Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson. Overview: The Stockton family has long called the fruit streets of Brooklyn home, and even as their children grew up and moved out, they stayed nearby. Pineapple Street looks at a period in the wealthy family's life from three distinct perspectives.
When it came out in 1983, Nora Ephron's comic novel became an instant bestseller. Now newly released, Heartburn pairs well with Jenny Jackson's smart comedy of manners, Pineapple Street.
PINEAPPLE STREET, a smart first novel from publishing executive Jenny Jackson, takes readers into the exclusive world of the one-percent through the lives of one wealthy family living in Brooklyn Heights. The Stocktons are a living example of generational wealth in America today.
Genres: Fiction, Women's Fiction. Paperback: 320 pages. Publisher: Penguin Books. ISBN-10: 0593490711. ISBN-13: 9780593490716. A deliciously funny, sharply observed debut of family, love and class, this zeitgeisty novel follows three women in one wealthy Brooklyn clan.
BOOKS | FICTION. Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson review: a blissful holiday read. This tale of wealthy New Yorkers reveals what makes rich families tick. India Knight. Sunday April 09 2023, 12.01am, The Sunday Times. On the money: the author Jenny Jackson in Brooklyn. SARAH SHATZ, ANDREW CRIBB/ALAMY.
Rife with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York’s one-percenters – glittering parties, weekend homes and hungover brunches – Pineapple Street is a scintillating, escapist novel that sparkles with wit and wry humour. But alongside the fun escapism of this ultra-wealthy setting, with the glitzy tennis club meetups and the didn’t ...