The game, Capture the Flag, pits Peter and Janis's blended family against the Edwards clan: Luke, Ellen, and their daughter, Annie. Each summer the two families meet at a farm in Upstate New York, where the fathers plot strategy and send their children into battle. In addition to 11-year-old Annie, there are Janis's two sons from a previous marriage, Justin and Nick, and Peter's three daughters, Tessa, Liz, and Samantha. This year, the summer of 1972, the game begins as usual, but when Annie finds herself lost in the woods with 14-year-old Justin, things get out of hand:
Justin kissed her again, and this time Annie let him have her mouth as if it was part of a dare she couldn't refuse, then she let him have the inside of her shirt, her barely beginning breasts. Each new part of her that he grabbed froze her into shock. I am not my body, she thought, as he pushed her onto the ground.This is only the first of many betrayals in Rebecca Chace's coming-of-age novel. Over the course of the next five years, the Edwards and Shanlick marriages both come apart and the children are left more and more to their own devices. These devices include experimentation with drugs, alcohol, and a lot of sexual couplings and uncouplings among the five step-siblings and Annie. With so much going on, you'd expect Capture the Flag to fairly sizzle with excitement. Unfortunately, Chace's writing is strangely prosaic, given its subject matter, as if she were taking dictation directly from her inarticulate characters. Still, when she describes New York life in the 1970s, her book comes instantly to life. --Margaret Prior