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.
Not only does she succeed in getting us not to loathe the Stocktons, the family at the center of her debut novel, Pineapple Street, but she even succeeds in persuading us to love them. A little bit ... An unabashedly old-fashioned story involving wills, trust funds, prenups and property ... While Jackson’s characters are admirably complex and not un-self-aware, and while they do ruminate on privilege and what it provides...the concept of entitlement never quite leaves the novel’s background ... Take these things as they are or don’t take them at all; the novel and its author offer no apologies.
Sparkling ... That the book is smart and sharply observed, peppered with small gems, should come as no surprise ... Fans of well-observed foibles will have a ball; class warriors might look elsewhere.
Pineapple Street stands on its own as a smart comedy of manners ... Humor, being topical and dependent on sharp observation of behavior and detail, needs to keep in step with changing times, as Jackson does here. But the shock of social recognition — the moment when a good writer transforms an everyday detail about cheese cubes into an observation about the casual cruelties of class hierarchy — remains as jolting as getting or throwing a pie in the face.
