Playground Zero: A Novel. This item is unavailable.Playground Zero: A Novel

A story about girlhood in the 1960s...

1968. Siren songs and loosened bonds. War, campaign slogans, and assassination. At the height of the Vietnam War protests, Washington lawyer Tom Rayson uproots his family for the freewheeling city of Berkeley. As her parents make forays into the counterculture, twelve-year-old Alice embraces the moment in America's cultural ground zero. Feeling estranged from her family and school, Alice falls in with Jim and Valerie Dupres, whose dad is selling jeans and making revolution. Jim and Valerie have been learning the ropes on Telegraph Avenue and camping out in People's Park. As family and school fade away in a tear-gas fog, Alice feels an ambiguous freedom. Following the Summer of Love, she must find her way through a new world where street signs hang backward and there's a bootleg candy called Orange Sunshine. Caught up in a rebellion that feels equally compelling and absurd, Alice could become a casualty—or she could defy the odds and become her own person. One thing is sure: there's no going back.

Sarah Relyea is the award-winning author of Playground Zero, a coming-of-age novel about the 1960s, and Outsider Citizens: The Remaking of Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin, a work of literary criticism. Sarah grew up in Berkeley during the counterculture movement of the 1960s. She has taught at universities in New York and Taiwan. Sarah lives in Brooklyn, New York, and continues to spend time in Northern California.