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Summer of ’69
By Todd Strasser
Drawn from award-winning author Todd Strasser’s own experience with the season of Woodstock and the Amazin’ Mets, when his own teenage years were steeped in the era of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, this book chronicles the tumultuous summer of 18-year-old protagonist Lucas Baker. Lucas’ plans to hang out with his friends and experiment with drugs at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair are detoured when he finds himself in danger of being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War.
To further complicate his life, the beautiful, carefree Tinsley tests Lucas’ faithfulness to his girlfriend, who is away. Strasser gives perspective into Lucas’ complex and psychedelic summer, which includes storylines of his parents’ possible divorce, a bad trip at a Led Zeppelin concert, and a friend on the front lines in Vietnam who might not make it back alive.
373 pages (hrd), Candlewick Press, $17.99
Only Summer
By Rachel Cullen
Pelham-based fiction writer Rachel Cullen (Second Chances, The Way I’ve Heard It Should Be) explores love and relationships through the lens of four different women, each at a crossroads in her life, in the author’s latest page-turner.
This quintessential beach read follows Sabrina, a career-driven Manhattanite who receives a blast from the past via an ex-boyfriend after she is newly engaged; Heather, who is recovering from cancer on Cape Cod, with the help of a kind and a fiercely protective husband; Molly, Sabrina’s sister, who moves to Rye from Colorado and desperately tries to keep up with the Joneses; and Megan, who spends the summer taking care of Heather’s children while trying to make sense of her relationship with her boyfriend, who is away in London, as she spends an increasing amount of time with a man she meets on the Cape.
Readers will be drawn in by each character’s storyline and likely have trouble putting this novel down before it’s finished.
337 pages (pbk), CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, $12.99