The Optimistic Decade

Heather Abel’s debut is both “an exceptional coming-of-age novel” and “a tart yet sympathetic send-up of the progressive left,” said Ellen Emry Heltzel in The Seattle Times. Set in dusty western Colorado in the summer of 1990, it focuses on three young idealists running a back-to-the-land kids’ summer camp— two who pair up and one who reveals an inflated sense of his own importance. “It’s not that you want him to fail. But through Abel’s eyes you see more comedy than tragedy in the possibility.”