Emily Rankin is a normal sixteen-year-old girl in California’s rural Central Valley. When a new history teacher, Dr. Connell McKenzie, comes into her life, something in Emily is awakened, challenging her to think for herself. To think, for example, about the fact that the president has been amassing troops in the Persian Gulf and that war is imminent—but not unavoidable.
The year is 1990. As a rare and devastating chill threatens to wipe out her family’s entire orange crop and the rest of the Valley’s economy with it, Emily must make a choice: to defend her convictions and risk losing her friends—her boyfriend included—or to keep the peace by not speaking out against the war.
Janet Nichols Lynch was born in Sacramento, California. Her short stories have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Seventeen, The Baltimore Review, and Writer’s Forum. She teaches middle school language arts and also teaches English part-time at the College of the Sequoias. She lives with her husband and two children in Visalia.
