In her new novel, Paradise Park, Allegra Goodman has created a picaresque Jewish heroine for the baby boom generation. Sharon Spiegelman's troubled spiritual odyssey takes her from Boston folk dancing to Molokai pot farming in the '70s; washes her ashore in Honolulu in the '80s to commune with dolphins, taste Buddhism and Christianity, and embrace Chasidism with a vengeance. In the end, she finds love and gets her groove back. Goodman has drawn the people and places with just the right blend of chutzpah and exasperation to make this fractured fairy tale believable and fun.

Havi Hoffman