The follow-up to the award-winning
Crystal Ships
,
Wandering Barques
traces the legacy of the traumatic '60s well into the '70s and '80s.
Twin sisters, just toddlers when their father dies in the Vietnam War, are coming of age in the mid-seventies. They each attempt to compensate for his loss in their own way, and their styles of coping could not be more different. The first strives to forget the past and live in the present, while the second seeks to understand those earlier years and obsesses about the loss of her uncle's girlfriend, a dancer who was tragically killed ten years earlier.
The story follows the pair's lives over the next decade-with one winding up pregnant and married and the other fleeing to Africa to live with her uncle's family and escape the temptation of forbidden love.
Readers will become immersed in the social and political issues that defined the era, from the AIDS epidemic to the Cold War. Still,
is primarily a tale of resilience, told with both sensitivity and the indomitable humor fundamental to the American spirit.