Loss of Innocence
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3.7 • 15 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
June, 1968. America is in a state of turbulence, engulfed in civil unrest and uncertainty. Yet for Whitney Dane - spending the summer of her twenty-second year on Martha's Vineyard - life could not be safer, nor the future more certain.
Educated at Wheaton, soon to be married, and the youngest daughter of the patrician Dane family, Whitney has everything she has ever wanted, and is everything her all-powerful and doting father, Charles Dane, wants her to be.
But the Vineyard's still waters are disturbed by the appearance of Benjamin Blaine. An underprivileged, yet fiercely ambitious and charismatic young man, Blaine is a force of nature neither Whitney nor her family could have prepared for.
As Ben's presence begins to awaken independence within Whitney, it also brings deep-rooted Dane tensions to a dangerous head. And soon Whitney's set-in-stone future becomes far from satisfactory, and her picture-perfect family far from pretty.
A sweeping family drama of dark secrets and individual awakenings, set during the most consequential summer of recent American history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thriller author Patterson ventures into mainstream waters with mixed results in this follow-up to 2012's Fall from Grace, the second entry in a projected trilogy. In June 1968, 21-year-old Whitney Dane, a child of privilege, is looking forward to her September wedding to Peter Brooks, her socially suitable college sweetheart, on Martha's Vineyard, Mass., where her family has a summer house. Whitney anticipates having the picture-perfect marriage of her proper parents, but the times are a-changin', and things do not go as planned. Early one late June morning, after a swim in the ocean, Whitney encounters Benjamin Blaine, a college dropout who grew up on the island and worked for Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign. Readers will know that poor Whitney will never be the same after meeting Ben, whose "angular frame, taller than Peter's, suggested litheness and grace even when still." The plot meanders along without surprise until a few shockers are thrown in toward the end. The result resembles nothing so much as a minor John O'Hara book, concerned, as that author's work usually was, with notions of class, personal and political change, and, most of all, heartbreak. First printing of 150,000.
Customer Reviews
Prequel
The book is good but I enjoyed Fall from Grace more.