Moon Over Mandalay.

Julie Rekai Rickerd is a Toronto broadcaster and public relations
consultant.

Moon Over Mandalay is set in the university town of Bloomington, Indiana, and its surroundings during the turbulent, permissive years of the late 1960s and 1970s. Despite the passing of almost half a century, many of its central themes resonate in the present: the never-ending battle of the sexes, the battle between “town and gown,” tradition versus innovation, career over romance, the constant search for self-fulfillment.

The principal characters, for the most part, are graduate students/lecturers in the arts faculty of Indiana University, thrown together when they rent a large, dilapidated mansion for the academic year. Their interactions and reactions to the complexities of communal life fuel much of the action.

To earn her keep, graduate student April Blume, a central character and extremely talented concert pianist, takes on the job of music teacher at a school in a nearby rural community. The hilarious consequences of her dealings with the students, their parents, the school’s principal, and her colleagues, as she brings Beethoven to the “boonies,” are tinged with bathos as she realizes she cannot budge the status quo.

As the “bohemian’” housemates struggle to clarify their aspirations and emotions to themselves and one another, they find solutions with varying degrees of success.

Rabinowitz-Green knows her subject well as she, herself, received a Master of Music degree from Indiana University, Bloomington. After some years of performing and teaching, she gave it all up to immigrate to Canada during the Vietnam War. Her personal experiences add to the vibrancy and veracity of this, her second novel. She illuminates the difficulties men and women encounter in matching their goals to their personal needs. The author’s wonderful sense of humor makes even the serious themes great fun to read.