Title: Green
First published: 1995
Description: Green is a novel about innocence lost: about the painful and often hilarious passage from youth to adulthood that we all must traverse. It is the story of Zoe McLaren, a Mormon girl of pioneer stock growing up in Monterey, California, during the 1950's. At odds with her prejudicial, convention-bound society, Zoe fancies herself a beatnik, a rebel with a cause - freedom - and wishes above all to merge with something worthwhile.

Yet she is a product of her times, a naive adventurer easily drawn down a precarious path. Zoe has a love affair with the father of her best friend, Margo, a brilliant African American girl adopted by a leftist Jewish couple, and marries a man of Native american descent who drags her off to Big Sur to "get back to the land." But the deep woods are not Walden, nor is her husband Thoreau. After great personal loss, Zoe learns that the answers she seeks are rooted neither in the untamed natural world nor in bookish idealism.

They are, rather, a combination of voices, a reflection of the diversity of our culture. In the end, Zoe realizes she must shed her green skin and learn to live for herself.
Subjects: Fiction, Young women, Bildungsromans, California, fiction
Places: California
LC classification: PS3569.H454 G74 1995