Lust vs. Thoreau

Fifteen-year-old Berny Crowell’s two-week stay with his parents in a cabin in the Adirondacks in the summer of 1959 is meant to be a time of “contemplation,” according to his father, a man for whom books have become refuge from an arid marriage. Wanting to pass on his love of literature, he has guided Berny’s reading and encouraged him to keep a journal. However, what Berny ends up contemplating is not quite what his father had in mind

when the boy becomes infatuated with Lorraine, the fortyish sunbather across the lake.

Add to the mix the athletic and super competitive Heather Whitcomb, also fifteen, and her little brother

Scotty, each coping in their own way with the loss of their mother. Then there is the apparently serendipitous meeting with Edgar Bliss, a highly regarded author, who turns out to be nothing like his conception of a writer, and Berny soon realizes that much in life is not as it seems.

Brimming with all the awkward longing and confusion of adolescence, Lust vs. Thoreau is a poignant throwback to those teenage days by the lake.