On one level, then, I've chosen to take the dark sadness that I found in some parts of Ginny Good and attribute them to the author's skill rather than things he had to endure. It seems a happier bet. You'll make that decision for yourself when you get there. But, unless you lived through 1960s San Francisco from the fringe spot from which Jones writes, it is possible you'll leave Ginny Good with a different view of the Summer of Love than the one you got there with. Jones brings a sort of careless insouciance to Ginny Good. An early hippie devil-may-care ef-em-if-they-can't-take-a-joke attitude that pretends to mask deeper feelings. Pretends, of course, because it's clear that Jones cares deeply about everything that befalls him and Ginny and the others we meet in Ginny Good. And he wants us to know he cares, but he wants us to find our own way to that conclusion. It's this intelligent respect for the intelligence of his reader that makes Ginny Good sing. That, of course, and the simple fact that most of the book is set in a place and era that holds eternal fascination for a large part of the population: the social revolution of the early 1960s.