A Season in Queens

By Joanne Dryansky and Gerry Dryansky

1946: The last of the soldiers who’d fought the War, those who’d been hospitalized, have been returning home.

In Cambria Heights, an outlying working-class enclave of New York City the people, having lived through years of calamitous losses and fears, are ready to revive the modestly idyllic life of their cherished little neighborhood. But their idyll is imperiled: GI’s are returning seriously wounded in the mind and emotionally, as well as physically maimed. This while the worst polio epidemic in American history menaces to spread through a community troubled by the “communist threat” that forebodes war again—and, in particular, the idyll is defied by an outbreak of racism, when a black air ace and war hero comes “home” here, to find a place to live.

This is the world that impinges on Erin Burke,16, in her relationship with a disturbed veteran with what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, then called “shellshock”. Erin looks back to when she direly became a woman though a moment of his sexual abuse. Having survived a botched illegal abortion and gone forward from that moment in lost time in a soon to be changed place, she marries her memory to her imagination to create a novel of her fateful Season in Queens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morgan James Fiction
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781631954535

Joanne Dryansky

Joanne and Gerry Dryansky grew up together in Queens, New York, a permanent couple since their first date when she was 14 and he 15. During most of their lives in Paris, rearing a son and daughter, they collaborated in Gerry’s role as foreign correspondent and magazine writer for several noted American publications. They finally left Condé Nast behind to devote themselves to fiction and screenplays, combining Joanne’s innate perceptivity and Gerry’s analytical attitude. They say it’s as if they’ve shared their genes to bring to life a singular person who is Joanne and Gerry. Both focused their education on the English language, Joanne at Queens College. After Gerry’s being graduated from Princeton Summa Cum Laude, Joanne tutored poor children while Gerry earned a master’s from Harvard— before they “escaped” academia, for the wider world of journalism and for co-authoring novels and numerous optioned screenplays.