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Title: EXTRAORDINARY LOOK AT AMERICA IN THE 1930s
Review: Jan Merlin has done it again! This time he has turned his attention to a setting closer to home: growing up in New York's tenements during the days of the Great Depression and World War II. Clearly now an author at the top of his game, Merlin presents the horrors of a poverty-stricken childhood without the depressing and unremitting perspective of McCourt's Angela's Ashes. Though the heavy burden of life's tragedies withers many, Merlin's world contains a tone that puts these events into perspective. A modern study in Naturalism, this is literature at its finest: Though Johnny Weismuller shows up only briefly for a swan dive, he represents the hopes of the times and the expectations of an immigrant Polish family. This is a remarkable book, and in my opinion, the most accessible of all of Merlin's novels; it speaks to Americans about the American dream in a way people will accept and revere.
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