An American tune : a novel /

Nora Quillen spends her days contentedly helping with her husband's veterinary practice and enjoying the beauty of the small town they call home. While helping her daughter prepare for college, though, she is brought face-to-face with, first, an old name and, then, an old love, remnants of a former life she has been hiding since one fateful night during the anti-Vietnam War movement almost 30 years ago. Unable to deny her past any longer, she is forced to look inside herself and make decisions that will inevitably alter the lives of everyone she loves. Shoup takes readers alternately to Indiana University during the 1960s antiwar movement and to northern Michigan at the beginning of the Iraq War, addressing the moral dilemmas of each while exploring Nora's feelings of guilt and helplessness. Fans of Jeffrey Eugenides or Tatiana de Rosnay will appreciate her ability to capture the spirit of a time and place while asking serious social questions. However politically minded, though, this poignant and stirring novel is at its root a moving and passionate love story.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2010 Booklist

Jane, from a working-class family, attends Indiana University in the mid-1960s. On her first day she is befriended by manic Bridget, who takes Jane's social life in hand. Through Bridget she meets Tom, who rapidly becomes the love of Jane's life. We see Bridget and Jane evolve in the narrative arc of the Sixties, as they transition from Villager outfits and drunken frat parties to ragged jeans and antiwar demonstrations. Bridget joins an SDS-like group and involves Jane in a deadly campus bombing. Jane is forced to go underground, and with a new identity and name, Jane-now Nora-settles in northern Michigan, marries and has a daughter. She manages to keep her past buried for years until her daughter enrolls in Indiana University. VERDICT Shoup's novel is most compelling in its historical portrayal of university life in the turbulent 1960s; ultimately, though, this is a romance novel, where relationships are a little too perfect and decades-long deceptions are resolved through love.-Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.