About the Author

Norris Church Mailer was raised in Arkansas, and now lives on Cape Cod with her husband of twenty-five years, Norman Mailer. She is the mother of two sons, and the stepmother of five daughters and two sons. This is her first book.

Reviews

"A CAPTIVATING READ . . . WINDCHILL SUMMER HAS ALL THE ELEMENTS. . . . A LITTLE MYSTERY, SOME HUMOR,
[AND] A DASH OF CHARM."
--The Denver Post

"WONDERFULLY SATISFYING AND APPEALING . . . It's the summer of 1969 in a place called Sweet Valley, Arkansas. Cherry and Baby [are] soon to be college seniors at the dinky university just a few miles away. . . . It all looks like a pleasant, predictable American life, but a long second look reveals that things aren't exactly what they seem to be. . . . [Mailer] loves her characters, and we fall in love with them, too."
--The Washington Post Book World

"IN GENTLY ROLLING SOUTHERN CADENCES, MAILER CAPTURES THE HORMONAL UPS AND DOWNS OF YOUNG WOMEN TEETERING ON THE VERGE OF ADULTHOOD."
--Entertainment Weekly

"THIS WINSOME COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL OFFERS MUCH TO MANY. Cherry, the narrator, is my kind of woman: good-looking, straight-talking, and able to describe what it's like to get amorous when you're wearing ten thousand petticoats. Most important, she's willing to decide for herself what's true."
--ELIZABETH BERG

"SMOOTHLY WRITTEN, SWEETLY SENTIMENTAL."
--The New York Times Book Review

YA-The Vietnam Conflict may have been in an area of the world far removed from the small town of Sweet Valley, AR, but when Tripp and Bean come home, they bring with them their nightmare memories of the killing and nothing is the same. Bean returns to his girlfriend, Baby. Tripp travels from California to Sweet Valley in his own quest for release from his past and falls in love with Cherry. The two young women try, often vainly, to cope with these young men and their double demons of wartime massacres and drugs. Other forces are at work in Sweet Valley, too. First one murder occurs, then another. Mailer captures all of the substance and flavor of small-town life in the late 1960s. While there is a great deal of action, the author's real focus is on the psychological development of her very real characters. Cherry's perspectives act as the moderating viewpoint and hers is often the common sense, middle-of-the-road approach. Baby is practical, to the point, and detail oriented. However, the mental anguish the young men carry becomes too strained for any help that the two young women might give. Mailer has taken a difficult period in America and presented a realistic tale of young people coping with serious issues of life, death, love of country, and growing into adulthood.-Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

The breezy, lighthearted tone of this debut novel immediately captures the reader's attention, but its guilelessness conceals a sophisticated, multifaceted evocation of the consequences of the Vietnam War, played out in the small town of Sweet Valley, Ark. What Cherry and her best friend, Baby, assume will be an ordinary summer before their senior year at college in 1969 veers abruptly off-course when a childhood friend, Carlene, is found beaten and drowned in the local lake. Everyday life lurches, then ambles on: at night, Cherry and Baby earn pocket money by peeling onions at the pickle plant, where Cherry meets Tripp, a Vietnam veteran who hails from Berkeley and who introduces her to all that name implies. Cherry develops a healthy doubt about the fire-and-brimstone faith in which she was raised ("It was scary how good I was getting at sin"). She also gradually comes to understand the way Carlene's murder has shaken the town, a place already shocked by the return from Vietnam of irrevocably altered hometown boys and haunted by those who didn't come back, like Carlene's ex-boyfriend, Jerry. Viewpoints intricately intermingled give voice to the thoughts, emotions and many secrets of a variety of compelling characters, through depictions of Baby and her family, the only Filipinos in Sweet Valley; throughflashbacks to Carlene's tumultuous childhood; through letters that Carlene and Jerry exchanged during the war. These many perspectives reveal one secret after another, and only the reader is privy to the network of enigmatic deceptions as a whole. Cherry's irresistible voice balances the story: each time the horrors of Vietnam (or of Sweet Valley's underbelly) invade, Cherry's vivacity fends them off, although her own path is rocky. In the end, the author (Norman Mailer's wife) makes her characters take the tough road, and her accomplished, bittersweet novel proves that they are hardy, resilient, and complex enough for a journey that readers will enjoy every step of the way. 12-city author tour. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.