Foreword
Speaking before a meeting of the famed Los Angeles Breakfast Club some months ago, Dr. Samuel Belgado, one of the nation's better known child psychologists, told the audience, "No parent ever did a child a favor by hiding or denying the facts of life."
"The facts of life are simple: people have sex, people live, people die; there are drunks and crooks and saints in about equal proportions in our society. There are liars congenial and psychopathic and there are the truth tellers, many of whom are only faintly disguised sadists. There's a little bit of good and a little bit of bad in almost all of us."
"But it is in the area of sex and all its sociological and physiological manifestations where the most damage is done to a child's mind . . . "
When the earlier settlers of our country moved westward, they quickly discovered that many Indians had a bad reaction to alcohol. They couldn't handle it, in other words. There is every indication that many females, largely as a result of their earlier upbringing, display exactly the same intolerance to sex . . . they can't handle it. . . they go completely overboard and become insatiable, or they become frigid.
In this new novel by talented Carl Garth, we shed a merciless, undeviating spotlight on the character of Sandy Miller, a new teacher in a backwoods area. She is ill-equipped to face the reality of society as it really is: she quickly becomes prey to the lesbianic approaches of an experienced and brutal older woman, is blackmailed by a gang of conscienceless youths, and finally in a state of mental and emotional uncertainty finds herself being plied with liquor and participating in a lewd sex show for some lumberjacks.
It is difficult to say how many Sandy Millers there are in this world. Many of them find themselves in the same position even in junior high school ill-equipped and unprepared to face reality, and with a naive innocence that fairly screams out to be preyed upon. Like Sandy Miller's, the awakening comes only in the middle of an intolerable nightmare, the nightmare called reality.
This is, frankly, a brutal book. With claws of steel it strips away all pretense of the main character and reveals her as what she is: hopelessly incompetent to go through the savage jungles of life without being devoured.
Because of its subject matter and explicit language we do not recommend this book to the easily offended or the immature adult reader. And under no circumstances should it be purchased by anyone who cannot differentiate between literary erotica and pornography.
-The Publishers