Slant Books

Ideals and reality collide when six college friends band together to start an ice cream store, promising ＂Better Food for a Better World,＂ but finding a worse world than they had expected.

It seems like a great idea: six friends from college pool their money and energy to start an ice cream store. Natural High Ice Cream: Better Food for a Better World. It’s high-minded, with a wink, like the marital self-help group they all belong to. The store finds a ready clientele in its northern California college town filled with amiable ex-hippies who are happy to contribute to a better world, even if all they have to contribute is the price of an ice cream cone.

But the store, like the marriage group, turns out to be work, not fun, and rifts start to appear between the friends. Nancy, who had seemed so easygoing and sweetly sexy when they started, turns stern. Cecilia, who had wanted to be a musician, is openly bored. And flighty, excitable Vivy is crawling out of her skin. She yearns for the old days, before Natural High, when she and her husband Sam traveled around the country with countercultural musicians and dancers. She’d give anything to have those days back again.

And so quietly, without telling the partners, she starts to rev up the old company, contacting her old acts-the fat contortionist, the muscle-bound juggler. She’s going to save them all, and Natural High, too. But saving turns out to be harder than it looks, and Vivy isn’t the only one with secrets.