Playground Zero
A Novel
by Sarah Relyea
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Pub Date Jun 09 2020 | Archive Date Aug 28 2020
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Description
Feeling estranged from her family, Alice embraces the moment and falls in with Jim and Valerie Dupres. Jim and Valerie have been learning the ropes on Telegraph Avenue, cadging meals at a nearby communal house and camping out in People’s Park. Soon they’re confronting National Guardsmen. As family and school fade away in a tear-gas fog, Alice feels an ambiguous freedom. Caught up in a rebellion that feels equally compelling, scary, and absurd, Alice could become a casualty—or she could defy the odds and become her own person. One thing is sure: there’s no going back.
Advance Praise
"An eerily compelling déjà vu of the free, wild, and jeopardy-ridden kid scene in late-1960s Berkeley. Uncanny and powerful."
- Charles Degelman, Editor, Harvard Square Editions
"Like a trip through the Looking Glass, Sarah Relyea's engrossing debut novel takes you by the hand back to the sixties, where social rules were being challenged and political upheaval was the norm. Relyea tells the absorbing story of twelve-year-old Alice and her family through a series of narrators as they each experience the kaleidoscope streets of Berkeley. But she saves her most lyrical and beautiful language for the disintegration Alice sees and the heartbreak she experiences."
- Patricia Hurtado, Brooklyn writer and journalist with Bloomberg News
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781631528897 |
| PRICE | $16.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 432 |
Featured Reviews
Sarah W, Reviewer
A fascinating exploration of a strange and exciting time in US history, 12 year old Alice arrives in Berkeley unprepared for the massive changes and freedom that she meets there. This book has an evocative feel and a shocking narrative that sees Alice follow her own path with dramatically reduced adult insight or guidance.
Alice has some outrageous adventures for a young girl who has been emotionally abandoned to find her own way in life, as a collection of adults finding their own way in massively shifting times neglect her and affect her life to varying degrees of harm.
The novel is well-written and the characters evocative of a very particular time and place, I was totally immersed in the story as Alice grows and develops in a world in which freedom has many different outcomes.
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