by Richard North Patterson (Quercus)
Following the so-called Summer of Love in 1967, young, politically aware Americans often referred to 1968 as “the Summer of Rage”.
Protest over the continued involvement of American forces in the Vietnam war and fury over the draft spawned civil unrest and outrage worldwide. In April came the murder of activist Martin Luther King and in June, Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
Twenty-one-year-old Whitney Dane is spending the summer of 1968 at the family holiday home on the legendary Martha’s Vineyard island. Marriage to Peter Brooks, a match made in heaven as far as her parents are concerned, looms.
Whitney is satisfied, although, as she tells her lifelong friend, Clarice Barkley, she could do without the spectre of the draft hanging over her fiancé’s head.
Spanning 1968 to 2011, the Dane family story starts with a 60-something Whitney recalling her past after meeting up with a younger woman. Both have loved the same man, at different times. The plot is, mostly, driven by Whitney’s story, which unfolds via her political and passionate coming of age.
Her family – none of them are as they seem – and as she discovers when she meets tempestuous activist Ben, who has been working on the Kennedy campaign – neither is she. “Idealists” who protest against the war are anathema to Charles, Whitney’s powerful, strict Republican father. Ben, this young man who persuades his daughter – already questioning current events (if not too strenuously) – to sit up and really take note, is not in Charles’s plan.
Author North Patterson’s book should please female readers sick of flaky heroines.
He asked feminist thinkers Gloria Steinem and Carol Gilligan to read Loss of Innocence for authenticity and both wrote blurbs for the book.