Last Summer at the Golden Hotel by Elyssa Friedland

Format: Audiobook (BorrowBox)

Read: October 2024

This is one of those books I randomly picked from the available titles in my library’s BorrowBox app, and I’d not heard of it or the author before. I just fancied trying something different and on the lighter side.

It was perfectly fine as an audiobook but I don’t think I’d have gotten through reading it on the page. The story follows three generations of two connected families as they face saying goodbye to their now faded Catskills hotel resort.

Since I have lived in the UK my whole life and have never had any Jewish friends until a year ago (and they’re from New York) there are a lot of cultural references that passed me by.¹ I have seen Dirty Dancing so I have a picture of the kind of place The Golden Hotel was, and I’ve heard of the foods etc through watching American media so I had the gist, but not much beyond that! I don’t think that is a barrier to enjoying the book but if you do have those cultural touch stones you might get more of a kick out of it! I did spent an interested few minutes looking up photos of hotels from ‘the Borscht Belt.’

I broadly liked the characters but they are stereotypes and the relationships between them are flat and lacking nuance. The mothers are all on the overbearing side, and that feels celebrated rather than questioned. The grandchildren I got a bit confused about, as they get labelled as Millennials but acted much more Gen-Z to me (or maybe I associate influencers with Gen-Z more).

I’d recommend this one as a light read if your library has it. It’s not very memorable but I was entertained for the hours I was reading it – which included going for a few jogs, I liked it enough that it motivated me to do that!

1. I remember going to a synagogue on a school trip but Judaism is a minority religion in the UK, only 0.5% of respondents identified as Jewish in the 2021 census. ↩︎