WORLD NEWS FROM WAVERLEY HIGH

It’s the tumultuous year of 1969, and high schooler Lena Rosen will have to face new challenges head-on in Kass’s historical novel.

Lena is a junior at Waverley High in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. She’s excited because this might be her breakout year, and besides, she has a heavy crush on senior Jack Stone. They wind up working alongside each other as associate editor and editor of the school paper, the Beacon. Waverley is a good middle-class school, an institution with an enlightened administration and faculty, proud to be integrated: The white students and Black students get along, sort of. Lena, like her friend Adam Stein, is a first-generation Jewish kid whose parents fled Europe. So WHS is racially and culturally diverse; the kids are aware of this, and most of them consider themselves liberal, enlightened, and idealistic. Lena’s favorite course is the elective “Current History,” which is just what it sounds like. On the first Monday of the month, the students discuss the good and the bad: the assassinations of MLK and RFK, the turmoil of Vietnam, Woodstock, the moon landing—all the big stories. In fact, the Student Council decides, with touching naïveté, that the year’s agenda will deal with Vietnam protests, ecological challenges, and racial issues (to be fair, they don’t presume to solve these things). The school play will be To Kill a Mockingbird. The Black students stage a sit-down. A student who’s passionately against the Vietnam War organizes a student rock concert. There’s a bomb scare that proves, mercifully, to be fake. All these things drive home to the students—at least the most involved ones, like Lena and her friends—that the world is a very serious place, and they are committed to doing something about it. The capstone of the year, so to speak, is Kent State, in May of 1970, where four students are gunned down by the National Guard, putting an end to naïve illusions.

Readers of a certain age will relate to this re-creation of a truly unforgettable and double-edged era. Kass even provides a soundtrack of sorts, as the kids listen and dance to songs that readers will certainly remember. Are these kids a little too earnest? Surely there are slackers and bullies and creeps at Waverley High, but they are nowhere in sight. Lena and her gang are hopeful and committed and, yes, a bit nerdy. Readers might find it easy to patronize them, and sometimes their speech does sound scripted. Adam Stein says that his parents’ experience in WWII recalled “such a horrific time.” “Horrific”? And to Lena his words cast “a shadow of anguish.” The book has a wealth of end matter, including all the music mentioned in the narrative, from the Beatles and Dylan to Sly and the Family Stone and Simon and Garfunkel—and some that only diehards will remember, such as the Winstons and Steam. The music is only part of the rich pop culture assault, a barrage of nostalgia that hits its mark. Many of these Waverley High kids would be grandparents now, and it’s tempting to imagine how their grandchildren might be coping in this new millennium with its own heavy challenges.

An earnest, meticulous reimagining of the late 1960s and the era’s tense atmosphere of social change.