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Readers give Reflections From a Glass House two thumbs up!
Candid. Smart. Wild. Sveilich nailed it!
The passages through adolescence near the “City of Love.”
— “Krazy George” Henderson
DO YOU KNOW THE WAY TO SAN JOSE?
Carol Sveilich’s memoir takes place in the 1960s and in the years just before the Santa Clara Valley morphed into Silicon Valley. Back then it was a sleepy agricultural basin dotted with cherry orchards and Sveilich’s youth in San Jose was a combo-platter of glass walls, cool music, useless gadgets, groovy neighbors, and worry. And, oh yes – sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.
Two reluctant parents from New York City, who loved a weekend party, every weekend, plus two kids on the loose equaled too much distress and plenty of adventures. The decade was filled with dreams and a distrust of the establishment, while popular culture overflowed with patchouli incense, psychedelic music, florescent posters, love beads, and TV dinners in aluminum trays.
Sveilich’s candid, touching, and often hilarious life story wraps around her family’s home and neighborhood in a time filled with both angst and amusement. Baby Boomers will recognize themselves in Sveilich’s mirror and young people will learn what it was like to try to "get back to the garden."
Whether you grew up in the 1960s, or if you lived through the decade but never really grew up, you’re going to enjoy Sveilich’s ride through the music and pop culture scene with her family of misfits and friends by proximity. With the forensic eye of a counselor and the delicate heart of a complex youngster, Sveilich’s story and musings are both heartbreaking and hysterical.
In Reflections From a Glass House, the memories of fumbling through school and the passage through adolescence near the "City of Love" are masterfully awash with comedic prose, amusing storytelling, and gut-wrenching recollections. Sveilich writes with observant precision about nostalgia, the highs and lows of youth, and the darkness of growing up in a family of disconnected souls that had humor as its connective tissue.
While each member of Sveilich’s nuclear family seemed to reign from different solar systems, they also shared a quirky home in a distinctive and progressive neighborhood of unique mid-century modern houses called Eichlers. These were futuristic, but affordable homes constructed of glass walls, an open atrium in the middle of the dwelling, and ceiling globes that hung like planets. The author’s own Eichler was filled with cats, chaos, and secret liaisons.
Author Carol Sveilich’s family of four moved from New York to a Bay Area community of inventive dwellings called Eichlers. These groundbreaking structures virtually appear as their own characters in this new pop culture chronicle. Her Eichler neighborhood, one of the first integrated neighborhoods in the early 1960s, was bursting with a cast of characters that will seem fantastically fictional. Yet every person and word of the story, Sveilich’s story, is factual. A “travel memoir” of sorts, this narrative takes the reader through one of the most vibrant but cockeyed eras to date – the Sixties, and one of the most confounding periods of everyone’s life – youth.
Whether you grew up in the 1960s, or if you lived through the decade but never really grew up, you’re going to enjoy Sveilich’s ride through the music and pop culture scene with her family of misfits and "friends by proximity," as she refers to them. With the forensic eye of a counselor and the delicate heart of a complex youngster, Sveilich’s story and musings are both heartbreaking and hysterical.
Climb aboard and travel back in time to suburban Santa Clara Valley, because before it was a hub of concrete and high-end tech companies, it was a sleepy valley of orchards, be-bop music, and lively mischief.
