"Agatha Krishna said it started when they came, so that's where you could put the blame. But then she said we had to go further back than that, so we blamed it on Reagan. Everyone blamed him that summer - the summer the country went into a bust, the summer we watched an exodus empty out of our town. Then I blamed the Cold War and Gorbachev."
"He had that stain on his head, and thus, I felt couldn't be trusted. We blamed AIDS, which we didn't really get but thought you could get from the water fountain at the public library you stepped on with your foot. We blamed the Olympics and hated Sam the Eagle, their feathered mascot, who dressed like Uncle Sam in red, white and blue. Though secretly, I had a button of him with his sly smile and torch."
Georgie Ayyar Creel remembers the pivotal summer when she was twelve and her sister Agatha Krishna was fourteen. Their Indian-born mother married a petroleum geologist and settled the family in Marley, Wyoming, a town dependent on oil, gas and energy. That summer a national economic bust and an exodus emptied out the town, while Cold War anxieties, AIDS panic, and cultural resentments intensified local fear and blame. The sisters cycle through scapegoats—Reagan, Gorbachev, the Olympics—before settling on the British and ultimately focusing their anger on their Uncle Vinny. Sexual abuse lies at the root of their decision to take violent action. The story fuses postcolonial identity, racial tension, and small-town decline into a dark coming-of-age revenge plot.
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