As a contemporary of the protagonist of The Fourteenth of September, Private First Class Judy (Judy Blue Eyes) Talton, I felt transported to my last year of high school. We protested the war, protested the treatment of Mother Earth, celebrated the first Earth Day, and expanded our consciousness with everything from drugs to Buddhism. Like Judy, I come from a conservative family who hated that I questioned the political situation in the U.S.
As Judy cannot otherwise afford to go to college, she accepts a military nursing scholarship, though she doesn’t particularly want to become a nurse. Her first year is a crucial time as she searches for meaning and tries to become informed about politics so she can make an intelligent decision about what to do with the rest of her life. Despite her military scholarship, she finds herself against the war. As she seeks enlightenment, she discovers the proverbial “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” She loses her virginity in her first adult relationship with a young man with rather strident anti-war rhetoric, who wants to lead their college’s anti-war movement. With the advent of second-wave feminism, she learns that women shoulder huge burdens yet are unappreciated. She confronts the deaths of her friends both within and outside the military. Her growth over time is well-depicted in a nice character arc. The lyrics of pivotal songs like the Beatles “Let It Be” and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” are woven in to good effect.
It is nice to see the anti-war struggle through a female point of view. The repetition of the weekly body count in the newspaper is a poignant display of how many young American men were butchered, but it also calls to mind the current pandemic with its ever-increasing body count.
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The Fourteenth of September: A Novel (She Writes Press, September 18, 2018) is available through:
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