Summer of '69

It is 1969, and the four Levin siblings have always spent their summers at their grandmother's historic house in downtown Nantucket. This year the family is scattered, and the usual routine is gone.

Blair, the eldest, is stuck in Boston, pregnant with twins and unable to travel. Kirby, the middle sister, is drawn into the civil rights protests and wants to stand on her own, so she takes a summer job on Martha's Vineyard. Tiger, the only brother, is an infantry soldier newly deployed to Vietnam.

That leaves thirteen-year-old Jessie at the house on Nantucket, feeling like an only child. She shares it with her grandmother, who is out of touch with the times, and with her worried mother. Both women are hiding a troubling secret.

The national news of the season presses in on the family. Ted Kennedy sinks a car at Chappaquiddick, and a man flies to the moon, while the Levins face upheavals of their own.

This historical novel is the author's first, and it draws on period detail of the era and of an island thirty miles out to sea.