Teeing Off

In Teeing Off, innocence meets with adulthood in a coming-of-age story told against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. The heroine--bookish but immature--struggles with the inevitable chaos of adolescence, a death in the family, and a growing awareness of how the war in Southeast Asia might impact those around her. For solace as much as protection from an adult world gone awry, she is drawn to the game of golf, and the serenely ordered setting of eighteen numbered holes. Ironically, it is on the golf course that she encounters a young man and family friend who exposes her to a dark secret they are to share for years to come. This secret propels both heroine and friend to a fateful series of life choices, sending one to Vietnam, and the other to grapple with misplaced guilt and an ephemeral search for closure. Teeing Off exposes the many ways--poignant, tragic and sometimes heroic--in which the war in Vietnam reverberated across time and the generations for those who lived with the war's legacy.