Description

Random House [Published date: 1960]. Hard cover, 312 pp. Stated First Printing. Good+ in good+ dust jacket. Blue cloth covered boards with black and silver lettering on spine. Light bumping, scuffing and fading along edges of covers. Spine cracked along back hinge, but binding is still nice and tight. Pages lightly aged but otherwise clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a 1/2" tear along the bottom back edge and several other smaller nicks and tears and light creasing along the edges. Light overall rubbing, soiling and scratching, NOT price clipped. Now in an archival quality Brodart cover. NOT Ex-library. NO remainder marks. Nice jacket art by Paul Bacon. [from front jacket flap] When Sarah Renshaw — beautiful, young and southern— went to Anchorage, Alaska, as a service-club recreational director, she imagined that in a place where the men far outnumber the women, life would be gay and glamorous. And it was exciting at first to know that all the men at the Air Force base were admiring her. But too often admiration became pursuit—a shocking game in a lopsided world, where the rules of civilized society no longer held. Here she was just a female — one of the females who lived in the Patch. Major Richard Landon fulfilled all Sarah's dreams of the ideal man, and her innocence about his intentions plunged her into a deep disillusionment. She turned to other men with a bitterness that was not in any way lightened by the experiences of her friends in the Patch, Maureen and Jenny — or by her own. The night she saw the seamy side of Anchorage with the suave officer who called himself Polaris ended in a disaster which had its shattering anticlimax months later, when she was the only woman in a desolate Alaskan outpost. Sarah might have become like "The Duchess," the beautiful, tragic womam who ran the Golden Palace night club; she might even have gone the way of the girls who escaped from the Patch into degradation. But Sarah discovered that she was not the romantic girl she had been when she came to Alaska. When she left, her experiences had taught her what love was not — and what it might be, at last, for the woman she had become.