Hope's Cadillac

Page recreates 1960s Houston with writing that can only be called exceptional. This is a book by a real writer.The book is about Hope, a married woman who is looking for the new ways of life being promised by the Beatles, Ken Kesey, the Firesign Theatre, and Terry Southern. Page captures the 1960s as a wonderful, exciting, and even scary dream of emerging consciousness. Frontiers were being expanded all the time--sexual, political, racial, and artistic, to name just a few. Page relates these frontiers in her story of Hope and of her husband, who see these frontiers quite differently.Page's pen is sharp and penetrating about the times: Sex was never just sex, drugs were never just drugs, and husbands were never just husbands. What grips you as you read is who and what proves to be life-affirming, and who and what proves to be destructive. Very few books can be called truthful artistic statements of given periods, but this is one of them. What happens to Hope is what happened to not a few women, and if you didn't live through it to know it, this book will tell you. You will never see the "freedoms" of Hope and the 1960s the same way again. There was always a price to pay. A terrific, moving first novel!