Love in Atlantis

“In this world there is love, there is fame, there is wealth, but the glory of the glories is to be a new girl in a little beach town in June.” The girl is Virginia and this is the story of her sexual awakening and admission into the never-changing mysteries in a southern California seaside town in the golden, long-ago summers of the 1930s. The little beach town is San Soleo (not to be found on any map), jerry-built just in time for the Great Depression, where time stopped when the money ran out. Virginia, in the course of the novel, evades rape, seduction, and drowning to reach a higher rung on the ladder of maturity. Bonnie Barrett has taken the oldest of themes and closed the time gap: she has caught the period and place with the fidelity of an old Glenn Miller recording, yet made it new, eventful, spicy, funny and harrowingly true. But more than that, she has evoked the bittersweet redolence of lost summers, lost youth, lost love, the time that for all of us lies drowning like Atlantis, now in a sea of changes.