By Deborah Emin
“I’m not in Skokie anymore . . . finding sex, love, and politics in my first time away from home.”
Scags writes (in diary format) of her first semester in college during the turbulent end of the 1960s. Join her as she goes to an elite college and discovers sex, love (with the wrong sort of man) and the political upheavals of her times. Follow her to Washington, DC for the anti-war march in November, 1969 and how this further telling of her awakenings leads her to a fuller appreciation of life beyond her bubble-enclosed Skokie, IL.
Her first diary entry starts like this:
Mama handed me this diary at the train station. I don’t think she realized what effect this gift would have on me. I’m sure my face betrayed how frightened I was of leaving home. She must have thought a diary would be helpful, be a companion on the train ride. When I opened her present as the train pulled out of the station, the first thing that caught my eye was my name, Scags Morgenstern, embossed on its blue leather cover.
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Scags at 18 is second in a series of four books all told in Scags’ voice as she grows and develops, moving from the relative safety of home in Scags at 7, to the world of college in the 1960s, to New York City during the turbulent 1980s and into Scags’ middle age where she ends her saga, but not the overarching story of the entire series. The series is an attempt to capture a woman’s journey from childhood onward, a constant coming of age story that never really ends.
For every e-book sale of Scags at 18, Sullivan Street Press will be donating $1.00 to the Foundation for Women's Cancer. (Please also read Lynda's Page for insight into the life of a woman living with ovarian cancer.)
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I read Scags at 18 today – WONDERFUL!!! When my daughters go to college, I pray they’ll meet someone like Lauren. Congratulations!!”
Kerry Langan
Author of Only Beautiful & Other Stories and editor of Shifting Balance Sheets: Women’s Stories of Naturalized Citizenship and Cultural Attachment
I am blown away by the voice and how the extremely pleasing and vulnerable younger Scags is still visible in the eighteen year old. I found the early scene of the orchard magnificent, the sensuosity of eating the apples, of rejoicing in them and almost an overwhelming of consciousness for character and reader.
You capture that magic of first entering the wide world, the wide-eyed wonder of its bigness, the excitement at the beginning before the experience. I loved the relationship with Charles, how Scags follows him, sits beside him at the “film.” She is without guile even when she steals the Virginia Woolf book.
She has such a childlike quality yet intelligent. The dinner with Charles, is so beautifully rendered. If this isn’t a sympathetic character, one the reader wants to protect, I haven’t seen one.
Stephanie Dickinson, author of Half Girl and Lust Series