Pineapple Street in Mark Twain House's Reading Challenge

May 08, 2024 Joan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, women-s-fiction, my-mark-twain-book-challenge, romance, morals-and-ethics, 21st-century

An ultra-rich old-money family in contemporary Brooklyn Heights, NY is not exactly welcoming to the new middle-class wife of their son/brother. His two sisters refer to her privately as the "GD" meaning, you guessed it, gold digger.

Darley, the older sister, has an MBA, but is a stay-at-home mom to her two children with Malcolm, who is (somewhat surprisingly) a Korean-American, and a highly successful business executive. When they married, she chose not to ask him to sign a prenuptial agreement, An ultra-rich old-money family in contemporary Brooklyn Heights, NY is not exactly welcoming to the new middle-class wife of their son/brother. His two sisters refer to her privately as the "GD" meaning, you guessed it, gold digger.

Darley, the older sister, has an MBA, but is a stay-at-home mom to her two children with Malcolm, who is (somewhat surprisingly) a Korean-American, and a highly successful business executive. When they married, she chose not to ask him to sign a prenuptial agreement, instead putting her extensive inheritance in trust for her children. Malcolm makes more than enough for their family to lead a very comfortable lifestyle.

Cord, the son and middle child, works for his father at the family's very lucrative commercial real estate business, in which they have bought up large swathes of the Brooklyn waterfront and developed the properties they have acquired. He is married to Sasha, a Rhode Islander who graduated from the Cooper-Union Institute, a free, but very competitive and respected college in Manhattan for art and engineering. She runs her own successful graphic design business, so she is hardly the "GD" her sisters-in-law make her out to be. Sasha and Cord are living in the family's lavish town house on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights.

Georgiana, the youngest child, has also been bequeathed with great wealth...and while she enjoys her comfortable life, she has never really considered what she has, or has even kept track of the investments that have been made for her. She works at a non-profit organization where she does public relations work, and parties the rest of the time with her besties. She falls in love and into an affair with an associate, who turns out to be married.

So what could go wrong in this gilded world? Plenty, as it turns out. This novel, partly family saga, and partly social satire, is testimony to the chestnut saying that "The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.'' That quote comes from Mary Colum, a 1930s book critic. For the quote's background, read here: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/13/bo...

This book was one of nine I chose to read and rate in the preliminary judging for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, which is given annually. While I enjoyed it, I would never consider it as a contender to go forward in the prize consideration. It feels somewhat derivative of Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians, but I do think it would, and probably will, make an entertaining movie, just as Kwan's book did. ...more

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Oct 29, 2023 Amanda rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I was underwhelmed by this book. It was hyped up as a funny, light-hearted debute novel that "captures a slice of NY society" and a "modern Gilded Age family dramady" - did I read the wrong book? I am not sure if we were meant to sympathize with any of the characters and cheer for their "growth," but I didn't, and there was none. 🤷‍♀️
I did learn that while the pineapple was originally a sign of hospitality in early America, it then was associated with class inequality. I guess it is back to hos ...more

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