LAST SUMMER AT THE GOLDEN HOTEL

Secrets and scandals come to light as the last family-owned Catskills resort teeters on the brink of extinction.

"Your grandfather was invited to the Oscars by Tony Bennett! So what if the Sullivan County health department gave our kitchen a C last year? We were once in the Guinness Book of World Records for smoking the largest sturgeon in history!" The Golden Hotel, founded in 1960 by Brooklyn College buddies Benny Goldman and Amos Weingold, with its sprawling campus, kidney-shaped pool, loaded dessert cart and name-brand entertainment, was a go-to vacation spot for Jewish families for decades. But the "three A's that sunk the Catskills"—air conditioning, air travel, and assimilation—have taken their toll. All its sibling hotels—Kutshers, the Concord, Grossinger's, the Raleigh, and more—have been demolished or turned into casinos or wellness resorts, and now there's an offer on the table for the Golden, too. Brian Weingold, the current manager of the Golden, calls an emergency meeting of the families to discuss whether or not to sell. By the time the three generations of each family arrive, other dramas are unfolding as well—a doctor husband running a pill mill, a gay son who hasn't come out to his parents, an engagement endangered by snobbery. Both the romantic sparks and competitive snarkery that have always flared when the two families meet are kindled anew. Friedland, who won a following with her cruise-ship novel, The Floating Feldmans (2019), pulls off a similar entertainment coup here. From the perfectly put-together diva grandmother Louise to the Instagram influencer and avocado-toast photographer @free2bephoebe, the ensemble cast is full of comfortably familiar characters, almost every one of them with something they're not tellin'...yet. The vanished history of the Catskills is evoked with love and plenty of schmaltz.

A high-spirited party of a book. BYOB: Bring your own borscht.