Publishers Weekly
05/27/2024
In this winning debut memoir, CUNY writing instructor Treska untangles what she learned from growing up in a working-class, crime-adjacent Boston family. Treska came of age in the 1980s and ’90s, long after the beachside amusement park of the book’s title had shuttered, though its legacy lived on as a symbol of the hopes and dreams of the “hardscrabble Bostonians” who populated the author’s early life. Her father, Phil, was a habitual gambler and occasional drug trafficker whose perennial optimism (“Each decision and small act was imbued with hope”) sculpted the author’s own sensibility. His entanglements with the Winter Hill Gang and other shady figures taught Treska to “hone her hustle,” a lesson she’s put to good use as one of “the waitresses of academia,” who makes ends meet by renting out her Harlem apartment on Airbnb. The death of Treska’s paternal aunt spurs her to return home to Boston and anchors her self-reflections, but there’s not much narrative thrust to speak of. Instead, Treska paints indelible impressions of Phil, his criminal cohort, and her lovers, including the avoidant academic she falls for in New York City. It amounts to an arresting and compassionate self-portrait. Agent: Annie DeWitt, Shipman Agency. (July)
From the Publisher
Straight talk!” —Gordon Lish
“This winning debut memoir... amounts to an arresting and compassionate self-portrait.” —Publisher's Weekly
“A poignantly affecting memoir about surviving and thriving.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A powerful, poetic memoir that brilliantly blends a history of Boston and its surrounding areas with the history of a fascinating—and at times functional—family. A swaggering storyteller of the highest degree, Nicole Treska will have your heart breaking on one page, and your eyes filling with tears of laughter on the next. Filled with hardscrabble characters and hard-earned lessons, here is a magnificent tale that is as New England as it gets.” —Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts
“A compelling portrait of the Treska family and its fascinating mythology. Hard-scrabble and beautiful, this is a poignant exploration of a working-class community, and the remnants of home as a vessel for memory. Through the complex rivers of love and history and family, Nicole Treska serves as a skillful guide of how to treasure a difficult past we might not always understand. Lyrical, keen, and full of tenderness, I’ll never look at Boston or its people the same way again.” —Safiya Sinclair, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of How to Say Babylon
“This memoir questions how far one can run away from the circumstances they’re raised in, and more importantly, how far they want to. Through zeroing on in on the lives, traditions, and struggles of people born and bred into limited options and resentment, Treska invites readers into her rendering of a stark, compelling reality, not hidden, but largely ignored by mainstream cultural conversation. This memoir is not to be ignored. Written with urgency, vulnerability, and compassion, Wonderland is under-the-skin unforgettable.” —Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Somebody’s Daughter
“Wonderland spoke to me like I was in the room while Nicole told the story. Her natural wit drives you through the scenic route of a life that many Americans attempt to bury with shame and guilt. Writing about the people you love, honestly while honoring their humanity and dignity, is a gift....Nicole Treska has it. Wonderland is a story that we can all relate to when we catch ourselves just being people. She’s got bars!” —Aida Rodriguez, author of Legitimate Kid
“Wonderland pays tribute to those who just can’t knock it off, to the infuriating romance of making a life on the wrong side of the Charles.”—Tracy O'Neil, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Recipient, Author of The Hopeful, Quotients, and forthcoming Woman of Interest
“Far as I can tell, Nicole Treska is a singular voice: one full of heart, humor, and wisdom, one charting a world I knew little to nothing about. I read Wonderland and have come away astonished by the singing truth of her lines, by how much command she has over craft, by how deep she makes me feel about her experience, though never with sentimentality. The way she sees the world and writes it is all her own—and what's better than that?”—Mitchell Jackson, Pulitzer Prize Winner, Whiting Award Winner, Author of The Residue Years and Survival Math
“Teeming with affecting prose, dark humor, and endless style, Wonderland is a hopeful, empathetic memoir about an unforgettable American family. Nicole Treska is a formidable debut writer with a beautiful heart and a tremendous ear for language.”—Kimberly King Parsons, National Book Award-Nominated Author of Black Light and We Were the Universe
“Wonderland is a wild memoir about all the unlikely, questionable ways in which we are capable of love. “Big hearts do dumb things,” Nicole says when trying to console her father for falling for a romantic scam online. Well, this book is full of huge hearts who do huge, dumb things and we can’t help but loving them a whole lot more each time around. “I was a steampipe building with nowhere to blow, she says of herself in the beginning of her story.” We are very lucky the steampipe has blown up.” –CHIARA BARZINI, author of Things That Happened Before the Earthquake and Sister Stop Breathing
Kirkus Reviews
2024-04-18
A New York City–based writer reflects on the life and family that she left behind in Boston but never left her consciousness.
In her debut memoir, Treska describes a Boston comprised of working-class people who dreamed of better and often of the kind of escape promised by the long-defunct Wonderland amusement park. “Boston’s rich history of greased handshakes and popping flashbulbs for the businessman, politicians, and mobsters making deals, created upheaval and impermanence for the rest of us,” writes the author. “We were sold out and told it was for the public good.” Treska’s way out of the city and her peripatetic military family, plagued by mental illness and drug addiction, was through education. In 2008, she came to New York to study, only to find herself caught in a post–economic crash world that drove her into debt and kept her “on poverty’s constant edge.” However, her willingness to try new things—e.g., becoming an Airbnb host—paid off, even as she found herself at the mercy of landlords seeking to profit from her rent-stabilized apartment. As Treska found a way forward through difficulty, her past continued to haunt her. An on-again, off-again relationship with a visiting professor she called the Turk taught the author that her need for illusion made her no different from her Vietnam veteran father, whom Treska tried to save from a tantalizing—but also exploitative—online relationship. At the same time, the Turk’s inability to commit made her realize how much her father’s inability to give of himself had influenced her choice of partner. As the author explores the way class, place, and family shape identity and desire, she also celebrates her ability to accept, with ferocity and love, the painful past that made her who she was.
A poignantly affecting memoir about surviving and thriving.
