Hi Caitlin, I have just finished Kennedy Girl. Sitting here feeling wowed at your deeply moving story. I read A LOT and rarely do I need to just sit and absorb the feelings of the characters and the profoundly moving story. The tragedies of the 60’s don’t seem to have taught us much by looking around societies today. Stunning read!
Awesome work and no doubt bound for success!
Odessa (Bromley) June 9, 2023
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Isn’t that why we read fiction?
Every story is an “escape” story. And in Caitlin Hicks’ Kennedy Girl, escapes are in progress on many fronts. The protagonist, Annie Shea is escaping childhood. Her black boyfriend, Lucas, is running from the L.A.P.D. in the immediate aftermath of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. And Annie’s brother, Bart, is hell-bent on reaching Canada to escape the Viet Nam war. It’s a time for growing up and discovering who you are—and the clock is ticking.
Annie’s battles with family and society testify to the preeminent human struggle between being safe vs being free. I love Annie because she’s a freedom fighter all the way. Her life reminds me of the saying, “A boat is safest in the harbour, but that’s not what boats are for.” Annie Shea needed no coming-of-age crisis to figure that out, but she gets one anyway.
Readers will love this Annie Shea encore. It’s the same Annie whose relentless antics captured our hearts in Hicks’ previous novel, Theory of Expanded Love. Neither author nor protagonist explain much in either book, instead we’re trapped inside Annie’s monkey mind. The reader can only go along for the ride and isn’t that why we read fiction.
~ PJ Reece, June 26, 2023 https://pjreece.ca/
Kennedy Girl hits all the high points of idealistic, troubled and iconoclastic 1968
I read Kennedy Girl in June 2023 along with it’s precursor, A Theory of Expanded Love. My work suffered, the laundry languished as I devoured these wonderful books.
The two novels follow the transformation of Annie Shea from a gawky twelve year old, desperate to make her mark as # 6 in a Catholic family of thirteen children (fourteen by the novel’s end), into an unstoppable seventeen year old as Kennedy Girl, the sequel of A Theory of Expanded Love. The novel opens in Pasadena California in 1968.
Kennedy Girl
1968. What a year to be seventeen. Hair is opening on Broadway. Bobby Kennedy is campaigning to run for President on a social reform platform. The assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King have unsettled America’s self image for many people, including Annie Shea.
Annie is cast in a musical revue of songs from Hair, directed by lecherous Father Sullivan and starring Lucas, a charismatic black dancer from a Catholic School in Watts. Annie’s older sister, the rebellious Madcap, is dating a Jew against her parents wishes. Annie’s older brothers are enlisting to fight in Vietnam with the enthusiastic support of their father, a former Commander in the US Navy. What can go wrong when Annie sneaks out of the house to join Madcap and Lucas in working on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign?
Kennedy Girl hits all the high points of that idealistic, troubled and iconoclastic year. Feminism, abuse of power, assassination, racism, war, loyalty and duty—these themes effortlessly unfold in this believable multi-layered narrative.
Caitlin Hicks has come to these novels following a distinguished career as a Canadian playwright, performer, and screen-writer. She has toured internationally in one woman monologue productions. This lived experience as a performer of what she writes has guided the dialogue, diary entries, and self-examination of Annie as she navigates the transition from teen to young woman, from the structured safety of home to the wider world.
I loved both books, I hope you will too.
My interview with Caitlin Hicks on Writers Radio, here
Carole Harmon, July 15, 2023 https://www.caroleharmon.ca/
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