The Lost Legends of New Jersey

by Frederick Reiken

Book Overview

From the critically acclaimed author of The Odd Sea, a poignant and magical coming-of-age story that "deftly explores the mysteries of love and loss" (Time)

It's the early 1980s and the suburban streets of New Jersey are filled with Bruce Springsteen-era teenagers searching for answers. Anthony Rubin is a rising high school hockey star faced with a family that is falling apart. His father has had an affair with Anthony's best friend's mother...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156010941
• ISBN13: 9780156010948
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

"Reiken Does It Again"

I really enjoyed Frederick Reiken's first novel "The Odd Sea." His second novel is another enjoyable family saga about suburban life in New Jersey. Again, he has created characters you feel you've known as friends, relatives, and acquaintances, just ordinary people coping with everyday life, and its many trials and tribulations. There's sex, drugs, alcohol, extramarital affairs, & coming of age peer pressures and problems. You name it, it's here in this story.This is the story of the Rubins family that seems to be falling apart. I think the only character that really has it together is the grandfather, Max, who cherishes life, and meets the love of his life at 81 years old. Anthony Rubin, the young son, is desperately trying to find love especially with his neighbor Juliette. Jess, his mother seems to have so many psychological problems. She knows her husband is having an affair with Claudia, and just takes off for Florida. And there's Dani, the daughter. Well, I'll leave you to discover her problems. All these ordinary people seem to be wondering what to do next with their lives. Sometimes it helps to read about other people and their family problems. It helps you forget your own. I enjoyed this novel, and I really came to care about these people. I look forward to the author's next book. Oh, and I hope you find your true "b'shert" in your life, too!

A Beautiful Work

Frederick Reiken has given us a wonderful, brilliant novel. It snuck up on me. I started reading it thinking it was a nice, coming of age in New Jersey novel, but after about 50 pages, I realized it is so much more than that. As a coming of age novel, it is wonderful. Reikien's prose is so evocative of a particular place and time (northern New Jersey, 1979-1981). But this novel is about so much more. It is about the tremendous hold the past has over us, how it keeps being repeated, in our actions and in our minds. It is about stories--the stories we tell, the stories we omit and what the listener/reader must extrapolate from beyond the boundaries of what is told. I highly recommend this book. I don't think you have to be from New Jersey, or in your thirties to appreciate what happens to Anthony Rubin, the wonderful protagonist, and his family. His parents separate after his father's affair with his best friend's mother and Anthony falls in love with the girl next door, whose father just could be in the mafia. A wonderful story, wonderfully told. I highly recommend it.

Wonderful

Bittersweet, in the truest sense of the word. Lost Legends Of New Jersey captures the mixture of soft reality and hard dreams, not only of growing up, but of being an adult, and still wishing. Reiken evokes suburbia so well that you can smell the wet lawns at 5AM and feel the dew on your shoes...not the suburbia which it is so fashionable to trash, but the one where it was almost safe to grow up and to dream in. By the end of the book you find yourself nodding and smiling a rueful smile. In the words of Jimmy Buffett, "Some of it's magic, and some of it's tragic..." I read it in two sittings, and was sorry when it was done.

New Jersey: Through Poetry and Unforgettable Affection.

A phenomenal achievement. Reiken's second novel, succeeds in capturing the melancholy, and at times almost dreamlike state, of surburn life in New Jersey, circa 1980.Yet the most remarkable accomplishment in the book are its characters. Each of them, carry with them a sweetness burried in thier own confussion about themselves, which makes them wonderfully real. Through choice,the book shies away form the conventional lineal narrative used in his debut The Odd Sea. And as result those who have read his first novel might fight the transition difficult as this book uses multiple view points to show the aftermath and ripple effects of a single event. Moreover, it works brilliantly. It is a remarkable achievement and Reiken's use of emotion through subtly ties the work together between the feelings of love: lost and won.

Powerful, heart-wrenching, beautiful

With his knockout second novel, Reiken makes it clear that he is not a one-hit wonder. A much more complex and multidimensional book than its predecesssor, The Lost Legends once again demonstrates Reiken's uncanny ability to create characters we feel and know and remember. The most amazing thing about the novel, however, is that it simultaneously manages to depict suburban New Jersey as both mundane and magical. The author's gift is that he is capable of taking the ordinary and, while keeping it realistic, achieve a certain resonance that stems directly from the characters' varying and all-too-human points of view. In other words, the magic is not literally magic. Rather, we feel a sense of magic because at certain times we feel a character's sense of wonder and beauty rising out of the sterility of the landscape -- something like the plastic bag scene in "American Beauty." Reiken is masterful at this kind of thing and New Jersey is the perfect setting for such moments of quiet luminosity. In one scene, for instance, the main character and his sister take a nighttime bike ride across Livingston NJ under a full moon. What could easily be banal turns haunting under the glow of the moonlight -- no magic realism here, just emotionally charged childhood wonder (and sorrow). Likewise, the scene in which Anthony finds a garbage dump filled with old band instruments in the Meadowlands becomes legendary... This is a powerful, heart-wrenching book, a must read, whether or not you've ever driven the NJ Turnpike!