With wit and soul, Nissequott's young Sheila Gray navigates the obstacle course of growing up. From March 1968 (when Martin Luther King, Jr., is killed and she is ten years old) to October 1973 (when Spiro Agnew resigns), Sheila unfolds her tale of life on Long Island. She watches TV and knows it can slip from I Love Lucy to live coverage of an assassination in the blink of an eye. She reads dirty magazines; she watches friends shoplift and a neighbor function on Thorazine: Sheila is a modern American. She is a girl who sits at the harbor, "looking across for God in the trees." She is a thoughtful Huck Finn living near a mall.


"Margaret Dawe's Nissequott is a dream of a novel about American girlhood. It has its own voice, its own place, its own heroine-a gritty Irish Catholic girl with a luminous presence. The novel certainly stands beside The Catcher in the Rye." -John Casey