Riders on the Storm: A Novel (Working Lives Fiction)

We think of history as a list of dates, a highlighted page in a text book, a crumb trail of footnotes. But sometimes history is personal, as tangible as the touch of lips or the clench of a fist.

Susan Streeter Carpenter takes us back in RIDERS ON THE STORM, her novel of the sixties, and of 1968 in particular. It's a year that makes us think--flower power, groovy, love beads--all the trappings of the counterculture, something to make fun of, to dress up a movie, the tie-dyed T-shirt as faded and dated as a flapper's beaded dress. But in Riders on the Storm you'll know 1968 as a year in the life of people who wanted to do right, to do better, who wanted to take the world with them to that better place. Ivy Barcelona, a college student in Cleveland, puts all of herself on the line for those aims.

But it's not just about politics--it's about love (for had not the Summer of Love just passed?), about hard truths, about the conflicts that arise when the personal and the political collide. Ivy begins as a political naïf, burning with undifferentiated idealism, and we follow her on the journey to a more tempered humanism. The novel takes these young people and us into the shabby, ill-lit rooms where revolution is embraced, to the marches in Chicago during the Democratic Convention, to the tunnels under the city where something dangerous is plotted. Ivy is our guide, an unknowing one whose political and sentimental education are emblematic of a generation of searchers. The explosive ending is like a fire that illuminates the thirty odd years since then, the story we have to know to understand who we are now.

Before 1968 shrinks away to a word in an old font on a dusty page, open RIDERS ON THE STORM and take the trip back to the era that shoved us into the future.

-Mary Grimm, author of Left to Themselves