From Library Journal
Bache (Safe Passage, LJ 9/1/88) brings a new twist to the classic tale of teenage rebellion. In the tumultuous years of the 1960s, Beryl longs for a normal family. Instead, she finds herself in a house churning with liberal ideas, a house she dreams of escaping. Her revolutionary mother in particular is a constant source of embarrassment. Beryl's liberation finally occurs when she enters the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Upon arrival, however, she discovers ugly rot beneath the veneer of Southern hospitality; the blatant racism and religious intolerance are impossible to ignore. Beryl tries her hardest to stay neutral, even after she falls for the handicapped David, who hangs out with the campus radicals, yet she soon realizes that even an unwilling daughter must sometimes follow in her mother's footsteps. Though at times the story drifts, Bache has created a realistic teenager in Beryl, a character filled with contradictions and searching for acceptance. Recommended.?Erin Cassin, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
As a desperate act of rebellion against her mother's very public social revolutionary activities and civil disobedience, Beryl Rosinsky enrolls at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill--that is, in 1963, in the heart of the segregated South. Beset by southern gentility and narrowness and a host of other paradoxes, the Jewish daughter of--besides the activist mother--a blacklisted former architect attempts to fit in by aping the campus' coquettish coed look. She also studies rigorously, falls in love with a young man lamed by polio, and learns about the strength of bonds between women--all during her freshman year, her first out of her parents' home. Set against a backdrop of American social protest, Bache's coming-of-age novel, with ethnic roots felt through the pull of family dynamics, is one of feminist Spinsters Ink's strongest offerings to date. It should please many.
Whitney Scott
