Jenny Jackson is a vice president and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. A graduate of Williams College and the Columbia Publishing Course, she lives in Brooklyn Heights with her family. Pineapple Street is her first novel.
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. shot through with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York's one-percenters, Pineapple Street is an addictive, 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-notes, and the insanity of first love—all wrapped in a deliciously funny, sharply observed debut of family, love, and class.
This book is definitely for people who enjoy slower-paced, character-centered stories. While a lot happens, not a lot happens that can be described like an action movie (and this happened, and then this, etc.). Most of the story centers around the character growth of the three main characters and those they fill their lives with. I found this to be gratifying, as it means the story is truly about how the fictional rich have their worldview broadened—not about that, through a murder mystery or through any other external, more action-centered storyline. The strength in this is that, once you get invested in each main character's life (which for me happened after the first three chapters), you won't be able to put the book down until you know how it all pans out.
I was pleasantly surprised at all the balances Jackson was able to strike throughout the book. The main one being the sympathy we feel for each of these women, and also the disdain we feel for their poor choices. I felt for Darley, as a woman who gave up her access to money for love, only to feel acutely "powerless" at the loss of her husband's job. But I also was disappointed in her inability to connect with Sasha. In the same vein, I wanted Sasha to try harder, but also was sympathetic to her outsider-plight. The hardest character to connect with was younger sibling Georgiana, but even by the end of the novel, I couldn't help feeling sympathetic to her as well, despite hating how long it took her to figure out how much money was affecting her day-to-day life. Jackson works well to bring these three women to life, and to find ways that readers can connect with her, while also finding ways to honestly depict their lives. In this way, the women felt relatable even though we knew they were of a much higher social standing.
Because Jackson does such a good job making us feel sympathetic to these women despite our best efforts to remain suspicious of them, she is able to craft a commentary on class and privilege that dominates without suffocating. Each woman has a different relationship with money, and those relationships evolve over the course of the novel—Georgiana's being the one that changes in the most hopeful way. The story is truly about these three women, but their money and privilege are always there, always lurking and informing how we as readers think about them and how they make their decisions. It is a very powerful way to craft an argument, and by the ending, you are left with a hopeful look at how things might change, even though the disdain for how the system exists in the first place will never truly go away.
I am surprised as anyone that I'm enjoying more literary fiction about rich people doing questionable things (but maybe I shouldn't be that surprised). I hope to read more in this genre, and I am curious to see if Jackson plans on publishing any more books! Until then.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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