Love in Atlantis
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“In this world there is love, there is fame, there is wealth, but the glory of the glories is to be a new girl in a little beach town in June.” The girl is Virginia and this is the story of her sexual awakening and admission into the never-changing mysteries in a southern California seaside town in the golden, long-ago summers of the 1930s. The little beach town is San Soleo (not to be found on any map), jerry-built just in time for the Great Depression, where time stopped when the money ran out. Virginia, in the course of the novel, evades rape, seduction, and drowning to reach a higher rung on the ladder of maturity. Bonnie Barrett has taken the oldest of themes and closed the time gap: she has caught the period and place with the fidelity of an old Glenn Miller recording, yet made it new, eventful, spicy, funny and harrowingly true. But more than that, she has evoked the bittersweet redolence of lost summers, lost youth, lost love, the time that for all of us lies drowning like Atlantis, now in a sea of changes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published in 1969 and long out of print, this appealing novel charts the rites of passage of a Californian who discovers that ``the glory of glories is to be a new girl at 14 in a little beach town in June.'' The town of San Soleo, jerry-built in the boon '20s, withering in the Depression, is the lost Atlantis of the narrator's youth. Her first day on the beach, Virginia learns that her lashes are long, her legs lovely; in the course of the following two golden summers she matures from childhood innocence to sexual awareness. She encounters sun-worshipper Mrs. Tenney, a middle-aged woman who has a ``blue spider''--a web of veins--on her thigh and who is an object of fascination for teenage boys, including Virginia's eventual boyfriend. Barrett's story is a long reminiscence, told by Virginia when she herself is Mrs. Tenney's age and has a blue spider of her own. Life in the '30s--the radio shows, jukeboxes and jitterbugging--is recalled with wry affection. The novel is as bracing today as a dip in the Pacific was for Virgina and friends in Atlantis.
