For a few decades now, I've been hanging around this fellow named Alan Brennert. He thinks I consider him one of my best friends. Actually, I'm just hoping that if I stick close to him, a smidgen of his writing ability will rub off on me and I'll be able to write novels a tenth as good as his last few — Moloka'i and Honolulu, to name two. His latest is Palisades Park, named for a fabled amusement park that a lot of us only knew from ads in old DC comics. Leave it to Alan to know more than that.
Palisades Park is about a family and about the daughter in that family and it's also about World War II and that amusement park…and if you'd like to read a little of Brennert and see how good he is, there's an excerpt on this page.
I recommend it and just about anything else Alan does or did. You can order a copy here or I'm told it just became a Costco "staff pick." That means if you go to one of their warehouse outlets, you can pick up a twelve-pack of copies cheap and on the way out, purchase a set of snow tires. This is a great time to buy snow tires, especially if you live in Los Angeles because, hey, with Climate Change, who the hell knows? But you can't go wrong with Brennert unless you're dumb enough to think that being his pal will make you a better writer. Hasn't helped me one bit and I've known the guy since half-past Richard Nixon.