Pineapple Street
A Novel
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3.6 • 62 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A deliciously funny, sharply observed debut of family, love, and class, this zeitgeisty novel follows three women in one rich New York clan
“Transporting and laugh-out-loud funny, this intergenerational story is a perfect tale for our times.” —J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of Friends and Strangers
“A vibrant and hilarious debut…Pineapple Street is riveting, timely, hugely entertaining and brimming with truth.” —Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of The Nest
Darley, the eldest daughter in the closely-tied, carefully-guarded, old money Stockton family, made the classic feminine mistake and gave up her job for her children before she realized she’d sacrificed more of herself than she intended; Sasha married into the Stocktons, and finds herself the outsider looking into the fishbowl, wondering if she will ever understand their ways; and Georgianna, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can’t (and really shouldn’t) have, and must confront the 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, loveable if fallible characters (and a few appalling ones!), it’s about the peculiar unknowability of someone else’s family, the miles between the haves and have-nots and everything in between, and the insanity of first love—all wrapped in a story that is a sheer delight of a read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jackson's clever if tepid debut chronicles the struggles of three women born or married into an old-monied New York City family. Cord Stockton, the family's middle child, marries Sasha, and the couple takes over the family's Brooklyn Heights house. Sasha, who comes from a middle-class Rhode Island family, is referred to as "the GD" (gold digger) by Cord's sisters. Darley Stockton, the oldest, gives up her banking career to be a full-time mom. Georgiana, the youngest, is mainly a directionless party girl with a gig at a nonprofit, where she's sleeping with her married boss. Tensions come to a head as Darley's and Georgiana's fortunes shift and Sasha decides to beat it for Rhode Island. Unfortunately, most of the characters aside from Sasha are underdeveloped (Stockton matriarch Tilda delivers predictably cartoonish lines, like "Sasha, would you like to tell us what it was like growing up poor?"), though Jackson shines in her incisive observations about the ravages of contemporary real estate developments (at the former Hotel St. George, "ghosts of the original remained, the green balconies that once overlooked the swimming pool... now home to a series of elliptical machines where old people and college students climbed to nowhere"). Despite the dusty feeling, this has its moments.
Customer Reviews
Thought provoking, intense, reflective
PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson is a contemporary, adult, stand alone work of fiction focusing on the affluent Stockton family on Pineapple Street.
Told from third person perspective PINEAPPLE STREET follows the lives of the three Stockton children, heirs to the Stockton fortune: Darley and her husband, investment banker Malcolm; Cord (who works for his father’s real estate investment firm) and his Korean wife Sasha; and Georgiana, who is employed at a not-for-profit aid foundation. Tilda and Chip Stockton come from old money and successful real estate ventures, and as such have influenced their now adult children’s ideas and ideals about money and class. The residents of the ‘fruit streets’ of Brooklyn Heights come from old money, and none more so than our story line family but money doesn’t equate to happiness, and the small cracks in the family’s foundation quickly grow into a chasm of haunting lies.
The Stockton family are elitist, classist, pretentious aristocratic snobs but none more so than the matriarch Tilda Stockton. Wealth equates social class, and the children are representative of a system of capitalism, racism, affluence and money but the Stockton children are about to come face to face with reality as each of their lives begins to crumble with the weight of keeping up appearances in the face of secrets, and the fall out of misery, pain, betrayal and loss.
Jenny Jackson pulls the reader into a thought provoking and intense, reflective commentary of the uber-rich; the one percenters who control ninety-nine percent of the world’s commodities and wealth, and the abuse of power and control between the have and the have-nots.