Something Red by Jennifer Gilmore

As I started to read Something Red I was reminded of the Bellamy Brothers song “Old Hippie,” the first of a series of songs about an aging man who must decided how to handle the new era. Jennifer Gilmore's book, set in 1979 and 1980, focuses on a family of somewhat radical Americans who are trying to adjust to life after the 1960s. The children in the family, a teenage daughter and a son who has just entered college, try to reconcile their parents’ activist past with their own post-sixties world.

I was impressed by how much Jennifer Gilmore drew on historical events to drive the narrative. A key event in the story is the Olympic boycott and the freeze of grain sales to the Soviet Union and many of the discussions in the book are about cold-war politics, food prices, and trade. 

At times, the story was a little hard to follow, as the author switched from character to character with numerous flashbacks to events long before the start of the book. This didn't matter though because the characters were so good that chronological events and the absence of clarity at times was irrelevant to my overall enjoyment. I can’t remember that last time I read a book and felt connected to so many characters all at once.