Summer Burns

Set in the early 1970s, this novel tracks the life of Joan, a teenage girl in a small beach town in northern Ontario. Evocative of Alice Munro's work in terms of sexuality and place, Mary Jo Pollak's novel provides a taut, trenchant view of a generation of girls and women. The tension between small-town conventions and teenage yearning is played out in a summer resort, where locals and outsiders collide and assemble. Joan and her friends encounter wannabe rock bands, itinerant dudes, trappers, bikers, and lovelorn fishermen throughout a season marked by pain and the pursuit of joy. This is a thoroughly nostalgic, perfectly poignant study in post-revolutionary passion and excess, refined through one young woman's steady, intent gaze. Angel Dust and acid trips; beach parties and pig roasts; drunken gravel runs; sexual misconduct and aching love; shaggin' wagons and a purple palace: Pollak captures what lies just beyond the Summer of Love, where desire burns, wild and unchecked. This is Mary Jo Pollak's first novel.