It's the 1960s. Now a sophomore at Del Rio Vista High School in a farming town in Central California, Janzen and his pal Jack Johnson are still smarting from their loss at the school's science fair a year earlier. They were convinced their rocket experiments would take top honors.
Uh, no.
Salley Marsh and her team win for hydroponically grown vegetables and "even Blake Sandy (my neighbor who is one year older and the older brother of Mandy Sandy) won attention with a model V-2 rocket."
For their biology class project David and Jack revisit their balloon experiments, this time monitoring the heartbeat of the rat-astronaut Gus Grissom as his capsule parachutes to the ground. Things don't go quite as anticipated—especially with teammates Molly Beth Brown and Mandy Sandy.
Readers should take each novel in order in the growing series, beginning with "The Art Of Stretching," then "A Fickle Wind," "Resurgam (Rise Again)," and, now, "A Fickle Life" ($7.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle). There's at least one more on the way since many loose ends are left hanging. And perhaps that's the point.
The city council faces protests when it tries to ban hot-rodding; David's sister Martha is secretly seeing whiskey-drinking, Cuban-cigar-smoking Billy Martin, younger brother of Bobby, a bully who died in a car accident; and rumors abound that chemistry teacher Karl Grundig, "former lieutenant in the German Army during the war," is creating a powerful cabal, including Jack and his father, promoting Nazi beliefs.
As Janzen reflects on the story he's narrating, he realizes the good ol' days are over, when the big question was how to retaliate against dirt clods lobbed by neighbor kids. "Life was turning out to be a continuous stream of losses…. This year, it felt as if I was losing a sense of normalcy. Everything seemed out of sorts—very fickle. I wondered if life would return to normal."
Uh, no.
