Playground Zero

2021 International Book Awards Finalist in Fiction: Literary 2021 Readers' Favorite Book Awards Finalist in Fiction: Social Issues 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.