Hardcover. NY, Summit Books, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Remainder mark on bottom edge, otherwise clean. Marge Piercy, whose earlier novels have chronicled the female experience in the turbulent '60s and 70s, now turns her considerable skill and passion to the 1950s in this portrait of women in transition from repression to freedom. Through the intense friendship between Jill and her cousin, Donna, we see and feel what it was like to grow up in Detroit in the '50s and go to college when the first seeds of freedom were sown. Through Jill's childhood friend Howie, and her relationships with Mike and Peter, we come to understand the danger that sex posed when abortions were illegal, making the outcome of a chance encounter of a night of love a matter of life and death. And, through Marge Piercy's brilliant, thought-provoking novel, our lives are illuminated.
