Better Days Ahead
Charlie Valentine
English Mill Press, Mar 2006, $19.95
ISBN: 0977218708

As the fifties begin, in Cleveland, alcoholic lounge singer Sarah Robbins learns she is pregnant. She changes her lifestyle from hedonistic drunk to caring single mom after giving birth to her son Billy. Sarah lives to provide him a comfortable middle class life at the cost of her own happiness.

In Detroit, Neil Dvorak divorces his cheating wife Janet, but loses his daughter Amy as the mother, regardless of fitness and ethics, always gets the child. He remarries Anne and they have a child Victoria, but he soon realizes her abusive nature. Rather than risk harm to his beloved infant by depending on the courts, he flees for California with his daughter.

In Alabama, Dolores Drake works in a sweatshop to insure that her two teenage daughters, Sonya and Brenda, have a good future. She also keeps them away from their sexual predatory father, Thom. Now forty-seven, Dolores is pregnant, when abusive Thom hits her she leaves fearing for her daughters and her unborn only to face racism.

In California, David and Karen Stratton are wealthy and seem to have everything going for them including the next family heir born in 1951. However, all their money cannot bring happiness and soon David turns to client Jessica Heisen for his.

These four families are coming together as the materialistic innocence and hope of the 1950s turn into the idealistic cynicism and violence of the 1960s.

This is an interesting look at the 1950s from the rotating perspective of four diverse families. The ensemble cast contains real individuals with dreams muted by disappointments. Though at times the switching viewpoints can become difficult to follow, readers will enjoy this powerful historical look back at a time of seeming innocence in the American dream not open to everyone.

Harriet Klausner