Ventura and Winnetka

“Breezy adolescent escapades in the Me Decade. . . . Coming-of-age in the 1970s is wildly fun and equally fraught. . . . Bryan writes with enthusiasm and economy in a voice appropriate to his teen protagonist and packs the story with colorful minor characters. . . . An abundance of pop-culture references could also attract adult readers wanting a trip down Memory Lane.”—Kirkus Reviews “Ventura and Winnetka is a dead-on evocation of what it was like to grow up in the Valley in the ’70s. The stereo store scene, when the sales guy finally gets to the good speakers, had me laughing out loud. J.G. Bryan gets it right.”—Lou Mathews, Pushcart Prize-winning author of L.A. Breakdown and Shaky Town “It doesn’t matter that I grew up on the East Coast in the mid-to-late 1970s. What J.G. Bryan captures so faithfully in terms of dialogue and social environments clearly illustrates that no matter where you came of age, 1970's culture was as shared and communal as a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine being passed around at a Dave Mason concert. Douglas, the protagonist, and his motley crew of West Coast pals trip and cavort through cars, stereo shops, sex, record stores, and senior year with a desperate search for truth and meaning. With real life beginning to loom, the stakes grow higher as the ground begins to shift underneath them. Punk rock culture begins rearing its head as the “Me” decade approaches its close and Bryan manages to create a viscerally vivid universe that calls to mind American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, and other great cinematic rite-of-passage films. The dialogue crackles with all of the warmth and authenticity of a record needle searching for that first groove at the head of the album. As the characters begin to come to grips with things like sickness and catastrophic car injuries, it’s as if we get to experience their growth in real-time. I felt like I was riding with these guys, sharing the same laughs and obsessing over the same girls and music. All that said, it doesn’t really matter what decade you grew up in. Ventura and Winnetka captures the essence of adolescence and teenage struggles, the drama, the camaraderie, and all of the fragile emotions that will always push this age group to the edge.”—Chris Epting, co-author of Dave Mason’s memoir Only You Know and I Know and author of It Happened Right Here: America’s Pop Culture Landmarks