Saltwater Taffy: A Summer at the Jersey Shore

Saltwater Taffy is about first loves. It takes place during one summer at the Jersey Shore in the early 1950s, when Johnnie Ray cried on jukeboxes, you drank Coke from six-ounce bottles, and lovers used condoms primarily for birth control. Saltwater Taffy delineates love affairs that are complicated by cultural and age differences during an ignored time period--that short breath between the post-war boom and Rock 'n' Roll. The setting is once-fashionable Essex Beach, NJ, a community where Victorian mansions built with old money have been converted to summer boarding houses for Italian-American families from New York and New Jersey. Saltwater Taffy explores how people fall in love. It compares the mature love of Sonny & Emily, the adolescent love of Bobby & Camille, and the violent love of Ralph & Toni. These relationships play out as intertwined melodies that climax in surprising ways on Labor Day weekend.