Summer of '69

by Todd Strasser

Overview

Drawing from his teenage years, Todd Strasser’s novel revisits a tumultuous era and takes readers on a psychedelically tinged trip of a lifetime.

With his girlfriend, Robin, away in Canada, eighteen-year-old Lucas Baker’s only plans for the summer are to mellow out with his friends, smoke weed, drop a tab or two, and head out in his microbus for a three-day happening called the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. But life veers dramatically off track when he suddenly finds himself in danger of being drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam. If that isn’t heavy enough, there’s also the free-loving (and undeniably alluring) Tinsley, who seems determined to test Lucas’s resolve to stay faithful to Robin; a frighteningly bad trip at a Led Zeppelin concert; a run-in with an angry motorcycle gang; parents who appear headed for a divorce; and a friend on the front lines in ’Nam who’s in mortal danger of not making it back. As the pressures grow, it’s not long before Lucas finds himself knocked so far down, it’s starting to look like up to him. When tuning in, turning on, and dropping out is no longer enough, what else is there?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781536206579
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	04/09/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Lexile:	HL830L (what's this?)
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	15 - 17 Years

About the Author

Todd Strasser is the internationally best-selling author of more than one hundred books for children and teens, including Fallout and The Beast of Cretacea, as well as the classics The Wave and Give a Boy a Gun, which are taught in classrooms around the world. He lives in Westchester County, New York.

Shortly after I was born in New York City, my parents moved to Roslyn Heights, New York (Long Island). In school my best subject was science. I had difficulty learning to read, and I still struggle with spelling and grammar. Despite those challenges I am now an avid reader.

I went to college for a few years, and then dropped out. I lived on a commune, then lived in Europe where I was a street musician. All the while, I wrote songs and poems and lots of letters to friends back home. After returning to the United States I studied literature and writing at Beloit College.

After college, I worked as a reporter at the Middletown Times Herald-Record newspaper in Middletown, New York, and later at Compton Advertising in New York City. In 1978, I sold my first novel, Angel Dust Blues, and used the money to start the Dr. Wing Tip Shoo fortune cookie company. For the next twelve years, I sold many more fortune cookies than books.

In 1990, my family and I moved to Westchester County, New York. I now divide my time between writing books and speaking at schools and conferences. When I’m at home, I like to read, watch sports, spend time with my children, play tennis, ski, and surf.


Fallout is part memoir and part speculative fiction. It is rooted in my experience as a twelve-year-old boy living through the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. What made this event unique for me was that our family was the only one in town who actually had a full-scale bomb shelter built beneath our house. Thus, I not only worried along with everyone else in our country about the very real possibility of a nuclear World War Three, but I had to worry about trying to survive as well.

Many of my anxieties concerned the possibility that a war might start while my father was at work, and therefore too far away to get home before the bombs fell. In that case: 1. Would there be time for me to run home from school before the bombs fell? 2. Since everyone in town knew we had a bomb shelter, would others get there first and demand to be allowed in? 3. What if my mother, brother, and I got inside and our neighbors came and wanted us to let them in? 4. How would we know how long to stay in the shelter? 5. What would we do when we got out?

These worries mixed with and influenced many of the other insecurities that boys that age feel —about relationships, sex, athletics, and school. As a result, Fallout is partly the story of what really happened, and partly about what could have happened. As a memoir, it is a recollection of a young man growing up in a world that may face destruction at any time. As speculative fiction it is an exploration of what well might have occurred had there really been a war. And finally, I hope that, in its own small way, it is a celebration of life in the face of adversity.

Three Things You Might Not Know About Me:

1. I didn’t start to surf until I was fifty-two years old.

2. I can hang both ends of a spoon from my nose, but not at the same time.

3. I share my writing space with a bison named Buffalo Bill.


Stuff I’m Not Sure You Want To Know:

1. Todd Strasser is the author of more than 140 books for teens and pre-teens. His award-winning young adult novels include The Accident, The Wave, Give a Boy a Gun, Boot Camp, and If I Grow Up. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and several have been adapted into feature films. He has also written for television, newspapers, and magazines such as the New Yorker, Esquire, and the New York Times. His most recent novels are the young adult thrillers Wish You Were Dead, Blood On My Hands, and Kill You Last.

2. His books for preteens and middle-schoolers include the seventeen-book Help! I’m Trapped In. . . series, The Kids’ Books. . . series, the Don’t Get Caught. . . series, and many other funny books.

Editorial Reviews

Strasser perfectly captures the golden haze of youth and life on the cusp of adulthood. Readers fascinated with this time period will find much to enjoy. All main characters are white, but Lucas' African-American conscientious objector counselor, Charles, offers his perspective on the war and the treatment of African-American soldiers. Vietnam, Woodstock, road trips, and acid trips: a sweetly bittersweet, surprising, even melancholy bildungsroman set against a world in flux. Groovy, man.
—Kirkus Reviews

Strasser’s protagonist is a riveting character—funny, yet also pitiful; foolish, yet justifiably frightened; self destructive, yet at his core self aware. The seedy glamor of the counterculture is on display, but so is the looming question, “What if that were me?”
—Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

The picture painted of the Woodstock music festival shows the dark side of peace and love, and the prevalence of drugs is on almost every page, though at times the use of psychedelics seems excessive. The best part of the book, however, is the one that transcends eras: Lucas' introspection as he contemplates his place in the world.
—Booklist Online

Strasser convincingly depicts the experience of the war and the opposition to it, the hippie culture of Woodstock, and the reality of using drugs. Much of the book is based on his personal experience as he explains in the author’s note. Strasser realistically portrays Lucas coming of age in the tumultuous free love defined by Woodstock.
—ALAN (blog)

Letters from Robin and a friend serving in Vietnam, newspaper headlines, and notices from the draft board provide ballast to Lucas’s self-centered perspective, as do his meetings with Charles, a Black draft counselor who gets Lucas to step outside of his own experience and see Vietnam as a “working-class war” that rich white kids evade by going to college while Black and blue-collar white kids get killed. An author’s note discusses the personal roots of Strasser’s tale.
—The Horn Book

From the Publisher

2019-02-17

The prolific Strasser (Price of Duty, 2018, etc.) offers a semiautobiographical account of a transformative Long Island summer in 1969.

High school grad Lucas Baker is working for his dad's bulk-mail facility for the summer, and it's not exactly stimulating, but he has the company of his good friends Arno and Milton and plenty of acid and grass at the ready. But his parents seem headed for divorce, and his girlfriend is off at camp, sending letters hinting at a possible breakup. He's also been rejected by the only college he had much hope of getting into, closing off his best shot at avoiding the draft. There are a few bright spots: the lovely Tinsley and the upcoming Woodstock music festival, which promises to be epic. Before he gets to Woodstock, he'll have to wrestle with his views on the war and the draft and escape a few hairy situations with his friends, including a memorable tussle with a biker gang. Strasser perfectly captures the golden haze of youth and life on the cusp of adulthood. Readers fascinated with this time period will find much to enjoy. All main characters are white, but Lucas' African-American conscientious objector counselor, Charles, offers his perspective on the war and the treatment of African-American soldiers.

Vietnam, Woodstock, road trips, and acid trips: a sweetly bittersweet, surprising, even melancholy bildungsroman set against a world in flux. Groovy, man. (author's note) (Fiction. 14- adult)

Kirkus Reviews