In Cambria Heights, an outlying working-class enclave of New York City the people, having lived through years of calamitous losses and fears, are ready to revive the modestly idyllic life of their cherished little neighborhood. But their idyll is imperiled: GI’s are returning seriously wounded in the mind and emotionally, as well as physically maimed. This while the worst polio epidemic in American history menaces to spread through a community troubled by the “communist threat” that forebodes war again—and, in particular, the idyll is defied by an outbreak of racism, when a black air ace and war hero comes “home” here, to find a place to live.

This is the world that impinges on Erin Burke,16, in her relationship with a disturbed veteran with what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, then called “shellshock”. Erin looks back to when she direly became a woman though a moment of his sexual abuse. Having survived a botched illegal abortion and gone forward from that moment in lost time in a soon to be changed place, she marries her memory to her imagination to create a novel of her fateful Season in Queens.