‘McMullen Circle’ and picks for teen readers

It’s 1969-1970, and the world is changing at a fierce pace. The civil rights movement grips America’s cultural arena, and the war in Vietnam is raging.

In “McMullen Circle” (Regal House Publishing, 2022, 170 pages), Heather Newton revives that time in our nation’s history, now 50 years in the past, by whisking readers off to the hills of North Georgia and a small town, Tonola Falls, which is also the home of the McMullen Boarding School. Here we quickly meet Richard Pierce, the school’s headmaster, who is married to Sarah, a student he met in his teaching days in a two-year women’s college in Pennsylvania. Their daughter is Lorna, a sometimes dreamy but creative adolescent who spends much of her time with her best friend Chase Robbins and Edwina Pickens, the daughter of the school’s cafeteria manager.

“McMullen Circle” — the title comes from the circular street ringing the school — is a novel composed of stories linking faculty members and townspeople. Like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which was a cycle of stories revolving around that town and a few main characters, McMullen Circle isn’t a typical novel with one or two main protagonists and a direct plot line. Lorna and her parents figure prominently in the action, but so do some other characters: a school librarian who cares for her aging partner, Margaret, who taught voice to the students and led the choir but has suffered a stroke, Edwina and her parents, a World War II B-17 tail gunner, Danny, who suffers nightmares from the war and whose alcoholism as driven him to become a permanent resident of a halfway house, and others.

All of Newton’s main characters struggle with challenges and unexpected obstacles. Disowned by her father and physically and psychologically battered by her alcoholic husband, a failed musician, Margaret takes a leap of faith by committing herself to the care and love of Evelyn. Richard Pierce, who swore an oath to himself at Lorna’s birth that he would never embarrass her, as his own father had so often embarrassed him, discovers this rule of parenting can wind up in a dead end. The young Lorna finds herself part of the battleground between her mom and dad, and tries in her own way to keep