FOCUS. CLICK. WIND.

A 17-year-old uses her camera as a tool for political activism during the Vietnam War.

Billie Taylor is a white New York City high school student who is inspired by the work of the photojournalists she admires. She’s dating Columbia University freshman Dan Geller, her high school’s golden boy. Things come to a head when they attend an anti-war protest at Columbia that turns violent. Billie’s single mother, shaken both by the chaos of the nation and Billie’s father’s desertion of the family, gets a job in Toronto, feeling that Canada is a safer option. Billie resents having to move and makes plans to return to New York. But when her mother begins housing draft evaders, this political engagement leads Billie to connect with a group of radical Americans working against the war through whom she finds unexpected opportunities to fight back. The story is slow to get started, meandering through Billie’s traumatic childhood memories, Billie and Dan’s relationship, and Billie’s job waitressing at a strip club before she is presented with graphic, disturbing evidence of the horrors being perpetrated by the U.S. military in Vietnam and the chance to participate in the resistance. Readers may benefit from Lewis’ depiction of the day-to-day realities of young Americans and Canadians during the Vietnam War as well as explorations of the importance of protest and considerations of violence perpetrated in the name of a greater good.

Valuable historical content weighed down by a slow-moving plot.