Growing up in the 1930s, there is no more magical place than Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey--especially for seven-year-old Antoinette and her brother, Jack. Toni helps her parents, Eddie and Adele, at the stand where they sell homemade French fries amid the roar of the Cyclone roller coaster. There is also the lure of the world's biggest saltwater pool, complete with divers whose astonishing stunts inspire Toni, despite her mother's insistence that girls can't be high divers. But a family of dreamers doesn't always share the same dreams, and then the world intrudes: There's the Great Depression, and Pearl Harbor, which hits home in ways that will split the family apart, and perils like fire and racial tensions in the park. Both Eddie and Jack face the dangers of war, while Adele has ambitions of her own--and Toni is determined to take on a very different kind of danger in impossible feats as a high diver. Yet they are all drawn back to one another--and to Palisades Park--until the park closes forever in 1971.
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