Audiobook11 hours
The Optimistic Decade
Written by Heather Abel
Narrated by Tanya Eby
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Framed by the oil shale bust and the real estate boom, by protests against Reagan and against the Gulf War, The Optimistic Decade takes us into the lives of five unforgettable characters, and is a sweeping novel about idealism, love, class, and a piece of land that changes everyone who lives on it.
There is Caleb Silver, the beloved founder of the back-to-the-land camp Llamalo, who is determined to teach others to live simply. There are the ranchers, Don and son Donnie, who gave up their land to Caleb, having run out of options after Exxon came and went and left them bankrupt. There is Rebecca Silver, determined to become an activist like her father and undone by the spell of Llamalo and new love; and there is David, a teenager who has turned Llamalo into his personal religion. But situated on a plateau in the heart of the Rockies, Llamalo proves that it might outlast anyone's heady plans for it, from the earliest Native American settlers to the latest lovers of the land.
Like Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, Heather Abel's novel is a brilliant exploration of the bloom and fade of idealism and how it forever changes one's life. Or so we think.
There is Caleb Silver, the beloved founder of the back-to-the-land camp Llamalo, who is determined to teach others to live simply. There are the ranchers, Don and son Donnie, who gave up their land to Caleb, having run out of options after Exxon came and went and left them bankrupt. There is Rebecca Silver, determined to become an activist like her father and undone by the spell of Llamalo and new love; and there is David, a teenager who has turned Llamalo into his personal religion. But situated on a plateau in the heart of the Rockies, Llamalo proves that it might outlast anyone's heady plans for it, from the earliest Native American settlers to the latest lovers of the land.
Like Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, Heather Abel's novel is a brilliant exploration of the bloom and fade of idealism and how it forever changes one's life. Or so we think.
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Reviews for The Optimistic Decade
Rating: 3.3000000266666665 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
15 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I appreciated capturing the essence of summer camp utopian feelings. That’s a rare theme in literature.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This may not be the book for me to review. It takes place in Delta County Colorado where I grew up. the zip code for Escadom is that of Paonia, the town where I grew up. I was so tied up in trying to make sense of geography, I lost the storyline about a man who bought property for a summer camp for rich kids and the anger of the rancher’s son from whom he’d bought the property.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Idealism vs reality collide in this thoughtful novel, set in the 1970s - 1990s, amongst conflicted back-to-the-landers and radical journalists. The main characters are "red diaper" babies, the children of Movement parents. Caleb yearns to be a cowboy and establishes Llamalo, a survivalist summer camp in the high mesas of Colorado. His young cousin, Berkeley freshman Rachel, is sent to the camp when her parents, publishers of revolutionary newspaper Our Side Now, make a momentous decision. She joins David, a year younger, who dreams of staying at Llamalo forever. Escadom, the former boomtown nearest to the camp, abandoned by Exxon when the company determined that shale drilling would be too expensive (foreshadowing the later fracking boom), is home to Don and his son Donnie, who reluctantly sold their ranch to Caleb when their income collapsed.All of these characters make for a very pungent stew of class conflict. Caleb, idolized by the campers and despised by Donnie, chooses a new female counselor as consort each summer, an entitlement that really stings in this #METOO era. Rebecca and David, on the other hand, glide into a lovely sexual initiation that is so perfectly drawn, from both perspectives, that's the best I've ever read. There's a lot going on here, and no one gets out very happy (except the reader). I hope that author Abel can continue this story in a second novel with the growing and changing of these memorable characters in the new millennium and beyond.Quote: "The promise of pleasure was itself so pleasurable that he almost wanted to prolong this expectancy."
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Set in 1990, with a backstory in the 1980's, this is a novel of miscommunication of all sorts: things unsaid, things said but not meant, mis-statements, and things misunderstood. Llamalo is a camp created by Caleb and designed to be a kind of wilderness utopia. In 1990 Rachel, a Berkeley student, ends up there for the summer at the behest of her father, who doesn't want her to know that he is terminating his left-wing newspaper. Her childhood friend David has been attending this camp for years and is obsessed with its philosophy and the charismatic Caleb. As the story unfolds, though, we learn that all is not as it seems. The narrative intersperses explanations from the past that somewhat explain the unraveling of the present. At times the motivations of the characters are not fully developed, and the conversations seem disjointed. Perhaps that's intentional, because readers will realize that the characters' actions and words lead to unintended results.