Freda (Suburban Guerrillas) gracefully tiptoes through a minefield of clichés in his second novel, a coming-of-age story about an 18-year-old boy who struggles to find direction in the midst of a family crisis and the ongoing fear of being drafted to serve in Vietnam. It is 1969, and Nick Lauria is spending his final summer before college hanging out with his best friend, Charlie Miles, while working at his family's campgrounds in Delaware Ford, a small New York town just up the road from the farm where Woodstock is to be held. Nick spends his spare time trying to bed Darlene Van Vooren, the youngest of the three gorgeous Van Vooren sisters. But beneath the surface of Nick's idyllic existence, his family is in trouble—his father's business partner in the campground venture, Charlie's father, is constantly concocting get-rich-quick business schemes that drain the family resources and put a strain on his parents' already troubled marriage. The business crisis and Nick's new relationship come to a head at the opening of the Woodstock festival, which threatens to inundate the campgrounds with revelers. Freda is an engaging storyteller, and the likable Nick anchors this well-paced tale. Some readers may be put off by the roteness of the scene-setting (a long passage has Nick watching the moon landing, for instance), but Freda's well-observed family dynamics make this a solid if unspectacular effort. Agent, Gail Hochman.(Feb.)
