| General | "Having grown up in 1970s Southern California, I can personally attest to this novel's utterly uncanny evocation of the era. It's also really really fucking funny…" -- Jonathan Selwood, author of The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse
"This book will make you laugh and cry in public. Jessica Anya Blau has written a soaring teenage lament, perfectly pitched, containing the single saddest and funniest line of seduction ever uttered."
Larry Doyle, author of I Love You Beth Cooper
"Once you dive in to this sweet, sparkling coming of age story, dripping
with heart and heartbreak, you won't want to come up -- even for air."
-- Hillary Carlip, author of Queen of the Oddballs: And Other True
Stories from a Life Unaccording to Plan
"You may think you've heard this story before, but no one tells it as
wittily, winningly, wisely and well as Jessica Anya Blau."
-Madison Smartt Bell, author of many, many books
"You’re 14 years old in 1976 and your parents throw naked swim parties. How the hell are you supposed to have your own private sexual awakening? Jessica Anya Blau creates a charming protagonist, her charismatic Santa Barbara family and a summer of love, lust and confusion. You won’t want summer – and this wonderful book – to end."
-Ellen Sussman, DIRTY WORDS: A LITERARY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SEX, BAD GIRLS: 26 WRITERS MISBEHAVE, and ON A NIGHT LIKE THIS
“Jessica Anya Blau’s debut novel, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, is a delight: a California beach girl’s hilariously painful adolescence in the High 1970s.”
-John Barth, National Book Award winner and author of many, many books
"Funny and charming, moving and sweet—Jessica Anya Blau beautifully captures the awkwardness and the wonder of coming of age. The Summer of Naked Swim Parties is a remarkable debut novel."
-Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody
"Among the many truths in this intelligent, funny
novel about family, sex, and coming of age in the 1970s
is this: no one can embarrass us more than our parents."
-Geoffrey Becker, author of Bluestown
"Jessica’s Anya Blau’s Summer of Naked Swim Parties is a time capsule of 70’s details, from pot parties to the backseat of a VW bus. But Reader, hold your breath: This novel is moreover a plunge into that stage of life they call “coming of age,” and for Blau’s protagonist Jamie that plunge is risky and deep. At fourteen, Jamie is a precociously wise observer of human behavior; she’s also a chronic worrier. Hippie parents, an unavailable older sister, traitorous girlfriends, a sex-charged boyfriend—One sees them all through Jamie’s smart, engaging point of view. But behind the scenes one also senses the implied author herself. It’s in her tenderness for young Jamie, as though she too were holding her breath."
-Madeleine Mysko, author of Bringing Vincent Home
"Ms. Blau is a writer of wit, intelligence, deep feeling, humor and imagination and she gets into the head of a young person like almost nobody since J.D. Salinger."
-Stephen Dixon, author of more novels than I can list here
" . . . I'm infatuated with Jamie, or at least the way Jessica Anya Blau slowly defines her great, big heart and expanding consciousness. Blau takes the most embarrassing epiphanies of that fateful summer and writes about them with such subtle candor that it makes the readers' legs buckle, much as Jamie's do one summer night out past the eucalyptus trees . . . Jamie may be untethered as she floats through The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, but this reader found himself inexorably tied to her family, her story and the terrifying things that come bouncing her way. I promise you I won't be the only one." --THE OREGONIAN
" . . . you finish the book wishing
it were twice as long. It's hard to recall a debut as warm, charming and
comically satisfying as "The Summer of Naked Swim Parties."--SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
"Recovered Judy Blume addicts, brace yourselves for a relapse: Jessica Anya Blau’s debut novel, set in Santa Barbara, California, during the summer of ’76, is a poignant, gleeful ode to the turbulence of growing up—and a delicious thrill if you crave return visits to adolescence . . . Blau’s writing is frank, witty and occasionally hilarious . . . It’s a dead-on portrayal of the simple yet shocking revelations of youth: Friendship can be tenuous, sex is not contractual, and the importance of family trumps everything."--TIME OUT NEW YORK
" . . . I’m now able to add Jessica Anya Blau to our list of distinguished Baltimore-based writers. Blau sashays down the path of this all-too-familiar genre in her own singular, humorous way, and precisely nails the scorching atmosphere of the summer of 1976."--URBANITE
COSMO says, " Reading this heartfelt and humorous coming-of-age story is the perfect way to spend a hot summer day." (Listed in COSMO's top eight SEXY SUMMER READS.)
AUSTRALIAN COSMO SAYS, " “Blau's debut novel, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, is a delight . . . Blau's writing style flows beautifully so you will glide through this book and not want to put it down.”
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