Playground Zero

It’s the season of siren songs and loosened bonds―as well as war, campaign slogans, and assassination. At the height of the Vietnam War protests, Washington lawyer Tom Rayson uproots his family for the freewheeling city of Berkeley. While Tom pursues a romance with a sexy colleague in the Marin County woods, Marian joins a peace party that’s running a Black Panther for president and meets the Berkeley revolution. But for young Alice, her parents’ liberating forays become a blind leap in a city marked by beauty and social change―and for a girl, that’s no Summer of Love.

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.

Author: Sarah Relyea

Publication Date: June 9, 2020

Categories: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Spring 2020

Description
About the Author

Description

2021 International Book Awards Finalist in Fiction: Literary
2021 Readers’ Favorite Book Awards Finalist in Fiction: Social Issues

“This intense retrospective on people yanked out of the strait-laced Fifties and tossed into a culture of anything goes will appeal to readers wanting to learn more about Berkeley’s days of rage.”
—Historical Novels Review

“Like the writing of Jodi Picoult, Sarah Relyea has the ability to build a particular drama into a compelling plot, unveiled through multiple points of view. . . . Through music, literature, and actual events, the author creates a clear picture of the 1960s, especially the tumultuous events and the free-love flower power that swept the west coast in particular. This is a powerful, historical drama. Well constructed.”
—Readers’ Favorite, five-star review

“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

About the Author

Sarah Relyea is the author of Playground Zero, a coming-of-age story set in Berkeley in the late 1960s. Sarah left the Berkeley counterculture at age thirteen and processed its effects as a teenager in suburban Los Angeles. She would soon swap California’s psychedelic scene to study English literature at Harvard.

Sarah has long addressed questions of identity in her writing, including in her book of literary criticism, Outsider Citizens: The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin.

With her PhD in English and American literature from The Graduate Center, CUNY, Sarah has taught American literature and writing at universities in New York and Taiwan. She remains bicoastal, living in Brooklyn and spending time on the Left Coast.