Summer Project

About the Book

After three older boys grab Jennifer in the hallway at school to ¡°cop a feel,¡± her Aunt Viviane tells her that the boys were driven by the natural sexual aggressiveness of males and warns her that boys¡¯ aggressive nature and sexual ignorance coupled with girls¡¯ own ignorance about sex make the pleasantries of growing into womanhood problematic. ¡°But,¡± she says, ¡°it cannot be helped: how can young people learn in this society?¡±

Jennifer, at fourteen, has a scientific bent. She decides to forestall the problems of sexual ignorance and asks her smitten and so-controllable childhood playmate, Claud, to ¡±learn how¡± with her. She theorizes that if they sit quietly together with enough privacy for long enough, nature should guide them in learning how to make love.

Summer Project tells of the interplay of Jennifer and Claud as playmates, how they come to try their summer project, how it succeeds, the problems of deciding ¡°when not to,¡± their trouble with abstinence during school years, and what happens after they give in to desire at the wrong time and are discovered en flagrante. Their summer project changes their own lives and the lives of everyone in both their families.

About the Author

Born in a mining town in Arizona, studied music at UA, moved to Berkeley California in my late twenties, taught high-school music, history, and literature at a small town in California, then music for junior high-school students. I became a technical editor and thus learned at last how to write.