A Hope for a Different Future

[authorcharlieg]

There is a new writer in Reno. This new writer, a Molly Maguire McGill manages to mix an interesting mash of Romance, religion, nostalgia, and politics. A Hope for a Different Future is a Coming of Age novel with an interesting spin. Molly Maguire McGill stars in this novel as a woman transported back in time, from today, back to October of 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis is just beginning, John F. Kennedy is still president, and Vietnam is some relic of World War II.

Molly’s friends talk her into writing the President about her dream, our present, which she does. In her letters, she related to the White House about the President’s affairs, listing names. She had also discussed the Cuban Missile Crisis and nuclear tests in Nevada, classified information at the time.

With the name, Molly Maguire, and the classified information, she finally catches the attention of the Secret Service. They arrive at her home on the Eve of Thanksgiving.

Her parents are busy listening to their favorite music, folk music extolling the virtues of the common laborer. This only serves to heighten the sensitivities of the Secret Service. Still, when they meet Molly, they are convinced the letters really did come from the heart of a small child.

Molly gets to meet the President, for Christmas and Easter. In the process, she convinces the President to allow the communists to take over Vietnam in exchange for allowing America to help them develop a modified form of their government.

Instead of war, Hanoi welcomes McDonalds, Burger King, and the like. Peace reigns in Southeast Asia. Molly also presents President Kennedy, who she has a crush on, with details about the assassination plan. The president launches an investigation, which leads to the arrest on hundreds. He remains at the White House in November of ’63 and the assassination never happens.

A Hope for a Different Future revolves around how history may have changed if these two events of world history, the assassination, and Vietnam had never happened. How would the Civil Rights movement been affected? For her sixteenth birthday, Molly receives a VW Bus. Would the VW Bus had become the Hippy wagon if there had been no Vietnam? Like the movie, “Pleasantville” points out; the utopian suburbia could not last in a vacuum forever. How might this view of reality changed had President Kennedy lived and Vietnam not happened?

Still, much of A Hope for a Different Future revolves around Molly and Karl as they grow up and grow together as friends, and then in High School, as lovers. A Hope for a Different Future is a coming of age novel. We again hear the joys and the pains, of growing up in Levittown Pennsylvania, suburbia.

A Hope for a Different Future also presents Vatican II as it presents itself to mid-sixties America. As a result, A Hope for a Different Future mixes a coming of age novel with folk politics and progressive religion. You will love A Hope for a Different Future.