RaveNew York Times Book ReviewJack Parlett...who has mixed feelings, too, about paradise, hugs his ambivalence and makes good literature out of it. His concise, meticulously researched, century-spanning chronicle of queer life on Fire Island captures, with a plain-spoken yet lyric touch, the locale’s power to stun and shame, to give pleasure and symbolize evanescence ... Parlett [is a] skeptical yet definitive narrator of Fire Island’s carnival, a diorama he embellishes with autobiographical asides ... Quick personal vistas turn his book into a hybrid act, a place-based memoir sketching the evolution of a community animated by sexual arrangement ... He pays filial attention to archives and to the table talk of queer elders; intergenerational wisdom lends his tale its crepuscular bite ... At its best, this book enacts a glancing yet trenchant meditation on community, \'ecological precarity\' and the fugitive links between place and sexuality ... Parlett’s prose is never messy; its well-timed pulsations bring beach light onto the page.
