Paradise Park - by Allegra Goodman (Paperback)

About the Book

With an open heart, a soul on fire, and her meager possessions, Sharon Spiegelman begins a hilarious 20-year quest for enlightenment. But each time she believes she has struck spiritual gold she comes up empty when her irrepressible self shines through. NPR sponsorship.

Book Synopsis

Allegra Goodman has delighted readers with her critically acclaimed collections Total Immersion and The Family Markowitz, and her celebrated first novel, Kaaterskill Falls, which was a national bestseller and a National Book Award finalist.

Abandoned by her folk-dancing partner, Gary, in a Honolulu hotel room, Sharon realizes she could return to Boston--and her estranged family--or listen to that little voice inside herself. The voice that asks: "How come Gary got to pursue his causes, while all I got to pursue was him?" Thus, with an open heart, a soul on fire, and her meager possessions (a guitar, two Indian gauze skirts, a macramé bikini, and her grandfather's silver watch) Sharon begins her own spiritual quest. Ever the optimist, she is sure at each stage that she has struck it rich "spiritually speaking"--until she comes up empty. Then, in a karmic convergence of events, Sharon starts on the path home to Judaism. Still, even as she embraces her tradition, Sharon's irrepressible self tugs at her sleeve. Especially when she meets Mikhail, falls truly in love at last, and discovers what even she could not imagine--her destiny.

Review Quotes

"Clear, rain-washed prose ...In Allegra Goodman's ebullient, bittersweet, plaintive Song of Sharon, the heroine's true achievement is finding poetry in.becoming who she's been all along."
--The New York Times Book Review

"[The] narrator, that Sharon Spiegelman, has one of the most enchanting, idiosyncratic voices since Augie March."
--The Washington Post Book World

"With Sharon Spiegelman, Goodman has created a Huck Finn for the modern age, drifting down the river of American spirituality."
--The Christian Science Monitor

"Like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth before her, Goodman has achieved a breakthrough book."
--Time

About the Author

Allegra Goodman's novels include The Chalk Artist, Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls (a National Book Award finalist). Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Commentary, and Ploughshares and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She has written two collections of short stories, The Family Markowitz and Total Immersion and a novel for younger readers, The Other Side of the Island. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, The Jewish Review of Books, and The American Scholar. Raised in Honolulu, Goodman studied English and philosophy at Harvard and received a PhD in English literature from Stanford. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, the Salon Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is writing a new novel.