Introduction
"As parents we are not prepared for our own teenagers' sexuality because the sexuality we remember is so different from the sexuality we see," says Murray M. Kappelman, M.D., in SEX AND THE AMERICAN TEENAGER. "Today's teenager has transcended those occasional, abortive, hasty sexual experiments because he now accepts sex as a natural biological, integral aspect of his everyday life."
If, however, Dr. Kappelman's statement were one-hundred percent true, there would be only confused parents and not the many confused teenagers one can still find in this day and age. In fact, it would seem that the passage from the old morality touted by a teenager's parents to the new morality of that teenager's peer group is often a painstaking and difficult transition for any young person to make. A teenager (even one of today's variety), is often apt to find herself the victim of a continual tug of war between values (albeit archaic ones), foisted upon her by her parents and the more enlightened values of Dr. Kappelman's totally enlightened adolescent.
"It is possible that young people who adhere to the traditional value of little or no premarital sexual intimacy, especially within the setting of age-peers who are far more liberal, suffer some personal conflict or confusion," says Robert R. Bell in PREMARITAL SEX IN A CHANGING SOCIETY.
Mary Ann Crandale, in the following novel, is just such a confused young lady, made even more confused by a sister, Karla, who has somehow managed to break from parental restrictions to arrive on the scene an entirely liberated young woman. MaryAnn's sister sees nothing whatsoever wrong with premarital sex, lesbian relationships, or even-for that matter-with the breaking of such ingrained societal taboos as incest.
Karla Crandale could, in fact, have been the young lady Dr. Kappelman was referring to when he said, "She is 'liberated' from the constricted, inferior, accepting role of the past generations concept of young womanhood. She is more aggressive, more willing to extend herself sexually, and often becomes the leader in the sexual liaison with the other person."
MaryAnn Crandale, though, needs to endure a series of frightening events, triggered mainly by forces completely out of her control, before she finally comes to the startling conclusin that she and her sister aren't really quite so different as both girls had possibly originally imagined.
-The Publishers