The Berkeley Girl:: Rendezvous in London

Berkeley Girl #2

by Elise Frances Miller

Janet McGill protested against the Vietnam War in Berkeley and Paris, but now in London, she has found a new cause. Boyfriend Aaron, there to spend a romantic week with Janet and to dodge the draft, has other ideas. Their long-anticipated week together turns into months, Janet makes quirky new friends, and nothing turns out like either of them imagined. Miller’s authentic memories of the 1960s run throughout this novella, a sequel to The Berkeley Girl: In Paris, 1968, and she adds three new stories set in that turbulent era—touching, offbeat, and authentic. Together, these four scenarios capture the people, the excitement, the cultural upheaval as well as the tensions that still resonate with us today.

282 pages, Paperback

Published October 2, 2017

About the author

Elise Frances Miller welcomes you to her Goodreads Author Page, and hopes to have honest conversations with you about love and revolution in 1968 - and today! Her novel, The Berkeley Girl, in Paris 1968, re-released in 2016 (formerly A Time to Cast Away Stones, 2012), is well-researched historical fiction, but her life has been pretty exciting in its own way. She was born in Los Angeles into a family of diehard Republicans. She annoyed them all when she joined the Young Democrats in high school. She was going to be (and was!) the first in her family to graduate from college, and she set her sights on the bastion of free speech, UC Berkeley.

Look for two new stories in Fault Zone: Strike Slip, published by Sand Hill Review Press, Dec. 2019. Elise's memoir, “My People’s Park,” won 2nd prize for prose in Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the ‘60s and ‘70s (She Writes Press, 2013).

With Elise's art history degrees from UC Berkeley (1969) and from UCLA (1972), she began writing as an art critic and reviewer for several well known publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Art News, The Reader, and San Diego Magazine, for which she wrote a monthly column. Two of her short stories have been published in The Sand Hill Review (2007, 2010), for which she served as guest fiction editor in 2008. These were included in the SHR's tenth anniversary publication, The Best of Sand Hill Review (2012). In addition, her short stories have been published in many editions of the San Francisco Bay Area literary anthology, Fault Zone. Other gigs have included high school and college instructor and a communications director at San Diego State University and Stanford.

In 1998, she and her husband moved from San Diego to the San Francisco Bay Area, where was a member of the San Francisco Writers Workshop for 15 years. Today, she enjoys the region's literary opportunities and her memberships in the California Writers Club, San Francisco Peninsula Branch, Women's National Book Association, and the Historical Novel Society.
Website and blog at: http://elisefrancesmiller.com/.

Reviews

[Eve · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Elise Miller's first book, The Berkeley Girl, about Janet McGill in Berkeley and Paris in 1968, one is left wanting to know more about what happened to her. The Berkeley Girl: Rendezvous in London, is a sequel novella which does just that. Janet goes off to London to meet her boyfriend Aaron, and the story continues just enough to round out the two main characters, set against a backdrop of, this time in London, in 1968. Berkeley, Paris, London - all distinctly different in 1968, and Elise Miller captures the nuances of cultural and political differences in this tightly written novella. The characters ring true to the era, and the events seem very plausible. Well-written, and engaging. Miller rounds out the volume with three additional short stories set in the 1960's, deal with additional timely themes and characters, including racism/civil rights, drugs, and not-so-traditional weddings. I particularly enjoyed the diverse settings: a Midwestern farm, San Francisco's Bird & Beckett Bookstore, and Burlingame on the San Francisco Peninsula. All three locations were very accurately portrayed and the characters also were completely believable. An excellent read for those who didn't live during the sixties, but want to know what this fascinating period of history was like from a very personal point of view. Well done!

[James Hanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Berkeley Girl: Rendezvous in London (a novella and three short stories) offers an interesting study in dichotomy. In “The Berkeley Girl,” Janet Magill, still determined to make the world a better place, is hobbled by the single-mindedness with which she pursues her mission. Determined to rid the world of dried-up old war mongers like Lyndon Johnson and Charles DeGaulle, she instead alienates her pragmatic boyfriend, a draft resister who tells her he cannot afford the luxury of resistance. She also loses her free-spirited London friends, who find her fiery rhetoric to be off putting. In “The View from Pond Hill Pond,” a middle schooler is attracted to the hippie ideal of self-renewal—that is, until he meets some real hippies and discovers them to be slovenly, unoriginal people who turn him off. Reading these excellent stories, I am reminded of a quote from Gunter Gras: “Rivers that start in heaven end up in the Vistula”—the Vistula being a cluttered oily river that bears little resemblance to the pure mountain streams that feed it. For readers interested in the irony of the human comedy, The Berkeley Girl in London is a compelling read. Five Stars.

[Bill Baynes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Janet McGill took part in anti-war protests in Berkeley and Paris in The Berkeley Girl: In Paris, 1968. She took a Czech lover.

In the sequel, The Berkeley Girl: Rendevous in London, the self-absorbed, young student, still traveling on her parents’ money, travels across the Channel for a touristy interlude with her former Berkeley boyfriend, Aaron, a draft evader.

Janet meets an activist couple and gets involved in feminist demonstrations in London against her boyfriend’s wishes. She spoils his chance for a job in England when she unleashes a left-wing rant on her London friends’ conservative parents.

The novella is rich with musings and debate about movement topics, as are the three other stories that round out the volume. Miller embraces the political changes of the turbulent Sixties, but her characters flirt with and ultimately reject the counterculture lifestyle. Hippies are portrayed as smelly, strung-out, slutty and dishonest, their interest in New Age spiritualism as silly and empty. Except for Janet’s obscenity-laced language, traditional social values persist.