title: The Summer of '71
author: Branch, Rebecca
description: You're in a foreign country wearing a strapless, full-length metallic dress that looks like paint, and four inch heels on a cobblestoned street. Your eyes are painted black, rhinestones pasted to your lids, you have no money, no plans, and have attached yourself to a rocker who intends to make you his pleasure in exchange for a bed and a semblance of security. He gets arrested and now you're alone on the street, cannot retrieve your bags, know no one else, don't speak Italian; the predators start to circle and you're a piece of fresh meat.
  He's sitting by the fountain, playing his guitar. A young but brilliant American who spends each summer in the rich medieval villa of his aristocratic mother. He stands up for you and fights off the carnivorous Italian men.
  Summer of '71 is a story of hopelessness, resurrection, friendship, infatuation and love. Set against a backdrop of the ancient city of Rome, it's ruins, monuments, museums and café society, it is the whirlwind romance of a young prodigy, handsome, entitled, brilliant and alone and a down-on-her-luck fashion model, abused, mistreated and desperate for salvation.
  The first book in the Art Historian Superhero Series, this story launches the lives of two fascinating people who find happiness and enlightenment in one another. It is always romantic, sometimes erotic, oftentimes funny, and written with the loving hand of an art historian, sharing the wonders of the ancient city in the turbulent times of the social revolution of the seventies.