The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 12 May 2006
by Ann Hood
It seems that it was in the mid 1980s that the era of the 60s counterculture made its last true gasp. It was then that the twentieth anniversaries of everything from the Kennedy assassination to the Summer of Love forced a wave of Sixties nostalgia that hasn't recurred so much with the 30th and 40th anniversaries that followed. Now, the mid Eighties are twenty years behind us, and the cultural signposts of that era invoke memory and even nostalgia (who knew?). So it is that this little novel manages to convincingly evoke the era of the Eighties to a reader in the 21st century. The author, though, wasn't writing out of 80s nostalgia. The book was published in 1987 and was then merely contemporary. It is 1985 at the outset, and we meet the teenaged children of three women who met at a small unnamed New England college in the mid 60s. The kids all have to react and interract with parents shaped by their own era and decisions of their youth. Soon, the story shifts to an earlier time, when Elizabeth, Claudia and Suzanne all meet. Elizabeth is fiery and politically aware. Claudia likes the boys. Suzanne starts out conservative, swerves into rebellion and shifts back again, abandoning her past, her friends and even, maybe, her daughter Sparrow. Though Suzanne's story is the least told in the book, it seems her experience creates some kind of structural theme. Hers is the most in-depth relationship to her life and times. In the book, there are happy moments of friendship. Some of these moments are cinematic to the point of belonging in a Lifetime network script. There is tragedy in the story, as well, and the characters react, deny and escape from sadness in various ways. In the end, the book doesn't quite come together. The writing is so light that it seems to the reader that the author has missed an opportunity in her otherwise promising and ambitious story. The book isn't hazy with nostalgia, which is a plus. The times are convincingly presented. There is a sense of the passage of time, with acceptance and denial both being vivid reactions to it. But there's some depth of character missing in the tale. Still, worth a look.