From Publishers Weekly
In the North Carolina coastal town of Festival, over an eight-month period in 1988, Bache ( Safe Passage ) sets the compelling stories of three citizens whose lives encompass racial and class conflicts, marriages of compromise and teenage angst. Cassie Ashby, forlorn and rebellious stepdaughter of the manipulative county commissioner, begins her freshman year of high school by defending her black bus driver falsely accused by a white boy of making sexual advances. Jordan Edge, the vice-principal of the high school, finds fulfillment only in fighting fires. Alona Wand searches for love and fulfillment while creating jewelry and fighting with her staid husband. At the town's annual springtime azalea festival, these smoldering, intertwining narratives will climax in a forest fire that threatens the town. Mostly fast-paced, the novel occasionally falters in Bache's device of disclosing the same events from three points of view.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Love, rebellion, and tragedy collide in this tale of intertwining lives in a small North Carolina beach town called Festival--a carefully calculated story by the author of Safe Passage (1988) that never quite includes the reader in its passion. In the autumn of 1988, Cassie Ashby's stepfather, Royal, is gearing up for his biannual campaign as county commissioner, and Cassie, a surly teenager who expresses her dissatisfaction with life as a glad-hander's daughter by having her ears pierced as many times as she can, skulks around home and school looking for ways to cause a scandal in time to affect the election. She succeeds in her mission by defending a black bus-driver against an obnoxious white teenager's accusations of sexual abuse, and in the process happens to introduce her waiflike ear-piercer and jewelry maker, Alona Wand, to her school's vice-principal, Jordan Edge. This couple's lust for each other springs up as instantly as the flames Jordan regularly fights in his guise as a volunteer fireman, and Alona soon finds herself torn between Jordan's reckless machismo and the quiet, secure love of her shoe-salesman husband. As the winter progresses, Cassie's struggle against her stepfather's domination, Alona's frightening heedlessness, and Jordan's unfocused anger grow increasingly intense, reaching critical mass with the arrival of a raging forest fire that threatens to annihilate the sleepy town and leave these three citizens changed forever. An overly schematic plot, plus an abrupt and disappointing climax, mars this otherwise captivating story--but Bache's ability to evoke a particular time and place is remarkable. --
Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
