What a Wonderful World This Could Be
by Lee Zacharias
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
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Pub Date Jun 01 2021 | Archive Date Mar 25 2021
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Description
What Alex, illegitimate daughter of an alcoholic novelist and an artist, has always wanted is family. At 15, she falls in love with a 27-year-old photographer, whom she will leave when she comes under the spell of Ted Neal, a charismatic activist on his way to Mississippi for 1964’s Freedom Summer. That fall Ted organizes a collective that turns to the growing antiwar movement. Ultimately the radical group Weatherman destroys the “family” Alex and Ted have created, and in 1971 Ted disappears while under FBI investigation. When Ted surfaces eleven years later, Alex must put her life back together in order to discover what true family means.
A Note From the Publisher
Advance Praise
"...an impressive, vividly written, gripping work."
—The Compulsive Reader
“Lee Zacharias brings the 1960s and 80s to life with a poet’s precision and a novelist’s sense of drama in this luminous, riveting story. Spare, unflinching, and deeply compassionate, What a Wonderful World This Could Be is both a historical novel about political, artistic, and sexual awakening (and re-awakening), and a powerful mirror for our own time. I was gripped from the first page to the last. Alex’s journey from brilliant, neglected teen to mature artist broke my heart and renewed my faith in humanity in equal measure. This novel is a gift.”
—Abigail DeWitt, author of News of Our Loved Ones
“What a Wonderful World This Could Be, Lee Zacharias’s incantatory novel, is a complex, generous, unflinching portrait of Alex—a romantically conflicted, artistically gifted young woman who comes of age during the tumultuous sixties. Reading it is like hearing Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, but for the first time. There isn’t a smidgeon of nostalgia or sentimentality here. In fact, the world it invites us into couldn’t feel more timely or more true. It’s about loss and love and about how we can’t know one without the other.”
—Tommy Hays, author of The Pleasure Was Mine
“Lee Zacharias is one of those profoundly rare writers, a natural. Her voice is one you can trust, and her characters are real, moving, and come from the experience of someone who knows what trouble human beings get themselves into.”
—Craig Nova, author of The Good Son
“At the center of every art is a question of allegiance,” Lee Zacharias writes in What a Wonderful World This Could Be, a riveting novel that foregrounds the personal fallout of the political maelstrom that was the American Radical Left in the 1960s and ’70s. Zacharias’s allegiance is to a narrative that refuses compromise in its revelations of the highs and lows of fighting for a just cause in an unjust world, and the price photographer Alex pays for seeing clearly what others around her will not: in life, as in politics, actions have consequences, many of them irreparable.”
—Kat Meads, author of For You, Madam Lenin
“One of our finest novelists and a first-rate photographer, Lee Zacharias weds visceral language with lush visual imagery as she modulates main character Alex’s voice to match shifts in time that dramatically render her unforgettable experiences as a 15-year-old who falls in love with a 27-year-old photographer, as the wife of a ‘60s New Left activist, and as a photography professor who, in 1981, reconnects with her first love. What a Wonderful World this Could Be is about art, it is about political change, but most of all it is about enduring love.”
—Allen Wier, author of Tehano and Late Night, Early Morning
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781948692502 |
| PRICE | $19.95 (USD) |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Susan D, Reviewer
A well defined portrait of reawakening artistically, politically and sexually in the tumultuous sixties.
Alex is a gifted, 15 and the illegitimate child of an alcoholic author and an artist. She has always wanted to belong, to have a family and falls for a photographer twelve years her senior who she will replace by the charismatic Ted Neal. Ted is an New Left activist with interests in the anti war movement and as their life together evolves amidst the highs and lows of fighting for a cause, change is on the horizon. Ted is wanted by the FBI and disappears, the year is 1971. Alex’s journey and coming of age is about change both personal and political, love, allegiance, loss and the price one has to pay to put their life back together.
The year, 1981. Alex is a photography professor, enter Ted. Will this reconnecting be a reawakening for Alex? Will she learn about the true, unconditional meaning of what it’s like to be a family?
I couldn’t help but think about the songs of Dylan, Mitchell and CSN&Y while reading this engrossing novel. Lee Zacharias delivers action, emotion and humanity in this highly recommended read.
Thank you NetGalley, Lee ZachRias and Madville Publishing for an ARC in exchange for an honest book review.
