The Last of the California Girls

The Last of the California Girls is a Sixties romp through Southern California and the story of one man's obsession with the quintessential California girl She is all blond, beautiful motion; tanned and lithe, she represents freedom, youth, and a playful sexuality that is at once seductive and dangerous to a man's soul. The California girl became a national fantasy in the Sixties, a myth that embodied every daydream, set to the rhythm of a Beach Boys anthem. The story is told in the first person by David Levine, a Jewish New Yorker. In 1965, at the beginning of his senior year in high school, he moves with his family to the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. David is appalled. He belonged on a subway, not a surfboard. He meets Sherry Gentry, the cheerleader queen of the Valley, with blond hair floating to her waist, who drove a baby blue MG convertible and lived in a sprawling stucco hacienda with a red tile roof. The Last of the California Girls is a doomed love story set in the fading colors of the mythic Sixties.