Old Lady Sweetly Is Twenty

It is September 1951 and stunned Betty Wheatley is suffering from PVS (postvirginity syndrome). She just knows shell be unable to say no to the next amorous advance. She believes that all men can read her weaknessits written all over her face. Shes a harlot at the tender age of nineteen. And its all Camerons faultCameron with the bedroom eyes. A reluctant Betty, banished to rural schoolism in the isolated mountain town of Narrows, British Columbia (pop. 41), takes hesitant command of the Green School with its knotholed outhouse and traitorous Quebec heaterher first taste of work, her first sniff of responsibility. Bettys pupils, fifteen barn-scented empty heads, test her mettle; Betty repeatedly fails to get the upper hand. She is constantly reminded that she is pedagogically inepta certified turkey. She longs to run offanywhereafter every disaster and expos. But bits of skewed logic help her survive day-by-day; after all, a misanthropic roommate, a judgmental landlady, and a lascivious minister cant be any worse to cope with than her own ill-matched parents. While she skirts around amorous advances from both sexes and spiteful hate letters calling her a she-devil, Cameron, her boyfriend attending university hundreds of miles away, proves to be unfaithfulthe two-timing bastard! Can she adapt to a lonely spinster life in the backwoods, or should she chuck the whole endeavor and run off to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood? Fresh missteps and unexpected champions keep Betty flip-flopping and forming cockeyed deductions about everything and everyone until late springtime breezes dramatically challenge the villages offbeat game of happenstance.